' 

. 


WRITERS     OF    THE     DAY 


GENERAL   EDITOR:   BERTRAM   CHRISTIAN 


JOSEPH  CONRAD 


By  HUGH  WALPOLB 

MR  PERRIN  AND  MR  TRAILL 

MAR  A  DICK  A  T  FOR  TV 

THE  WOODEN  HORSE 

THE  PRELUDE  TO  ADVENTURE 

FORTITUDE 

THE  DUCHESS  OF  WREXE 

THE  GOLDEN  SCARECROW 

THE  DARK  FOREST 


JOSEPH  CONRAD 


JOSEPH 
CONRAD 


By 

HUGH  WALPOLE 


NEW  YORK 

HENRY  HOLT  AND  COMPANY 


TO 

SIR  SIDNEY  COLVIN 

IN   FRIENDSHIP 


CONTENTS 

VAQB 

I.  BIOGRAPHY  ....••  7 

II.  THE  NOVELIST 36 

III.  THE  POET 72 

IV.  ROMANCE  AND  REALISM       .        .        .  106 
A  SHORT  BIBLIOGRAPHY     .        .        .  121 
AMERICAN  BIBLIOGRAPHY    .        .        .123 
INDEX                                .       •       .  125 


5 

2033131 


BIOGKAPHY 


TO  any  reader  of  the  books  of  Joseph 
Conrad  it  must  be  at  once  plain  that 
his  immediate  experiences  and  im- 
pressions of  life  have  gone  very  directly  to 
the  making  of  his  art.  It  may  happen  often 
enough  that  an  author's  artistic  life  is  of  no 
importance  to  the  critic  and  that  his  dealing 
with  it  is  merely  a  personal  impertinence  and 
curiosity,  but  with  the  life  of  Joseph  Con- 
rad the  critic  has  something  to  do,  because, 
again  and  again,  this  writer  deliberately 
evokes  the  power  of  personal  reminiscence, 
charging  it  with  the  burden  of  his  phil- 
osophy and  the  creation  of  his  characters. 

With  the  details  of  his  life  we  cannot,  in 
any  way,  be  concerned,  but  with  the  three 
backgrounds  against  whose  form  and  colour 

7 


JOSEPH  CONRAD 


his   art   has  been   placed   we   have   some 
compulsory  connection. 

Joseph  Conrad  (Teodor  Josef  Konrad 
Karzeniowski)  was  born  on  6th  December 
1857,  and  his  birthplace  was  the  Ukraine 
in  the  south  of  Poland.  In  1862  his  father, 
who  had  been  concerned  in  the  last  Polish 
rebellion,  was  banished  to  Vologda.  The 
boy  lived  with  his  mother  and  father  there 
until  his  mother  died,  when  he  was  sent  back 
to  the  Ukraine.  In  1870  his  father  died. 

Conrad  was  then  sent  to  school  in  Cracow 
and  there  he  remained  until  1874,  when, 
following  an  absolutely  compelling  impulse, 
he  went  to  sea.  In  the  month  of  May,  1878, 
he  first  landed  on  English  ground ;  he  knew 
at  that  time  no  English  but  learnt  rapidly, 
and  in  the  autumn  of  1878  joined  the  Duke 
of  Sutherland  as  ordinary  seaman.  He  be- 
came a  Master  in  the  English  Merchant. 
Service  in  1884,  in  which  year  he  was 
naturalised.  In  1894  he  left  the  sea,  whose 
servant  he  had  been  for  nearly  twenty  years : 
he  sent  the  manuscript  of  a  novel  that  he 
had  been  writing  at  various  periods  during 
8 


BIOGRAPHY 


his  sea  life  to  Mr  Fisher  Unwin.  With 
that  publisher's  acceptance  of  Almayer's 
Folly  the  third  period  of  his  life  began. 
Since  then  his  history  has  been  the  history 
of  his  books. 

Looking  for  an  instant  at  the  dramatic 
contrast  and  almost  ironical  relationship 
of  these  three  backgrounds — Poland;,  the 
Sea,  the  inner  security  and  tradition  of  an 
English  country-side — one  can  realise  what 
they  may  make  of  an  artist.  That  early 
Polish  atmosphere,  viewed  through  all  the 
deep  light  and  high  shade  of  a  remembered 
childhood,  may  be  enough  to  give  life  and 
vigour  to  any  poet's  temperament.  The 
romantic  melancholy  born  of  early  years  in 
such  an  atmosphere  might  well  plant  deeply 
in  any  soul  the  ironic  contemplation  of  an 
impossible  freedom. 

Growing  into  youth  in  a  land  whose 
farthest  bounds  were  held  by  unlawful 
tyranny,  Conrad  may  well  have  contem- 
plated the  sea  as  the  one  unlimited  mon- 
archy of  freedom  and,  even  although  he 
were  too  young  to  realise  what  impulses 

9 


JOSEPH  CONRAD 


those  were  that  drove  him,  he  may  have  felt 
that  space  and  size  and  the  force  of  a  power 
stronger  than  man  were  the  only  conditions 
of  possible  liberty.  He  sought  those  con- 
ditions, found  them  and  clung  to  them ;  he 
found,  too,  an  ironic  pity  for  men  who 
could  still  live  slaves  and  prisoners  to  other 
men  when  to  them  also  such  freedom  was 
possible.  That  ironic  pity  he  never  after- 
wards lost,  and  the  romance  that  was  in  him 
received  a  mighty  impulse  from  that  con- 
trast that  he  was  always  now  to  contem- 
plate. He  discovered  the  Sea  and  paid  to 
her  at  once  his  debt  of  gratitude  and 
obedience.  He  thought  it  no  hard  thing  to 
obey  her  when  he  might,  at  the  same  time, 
so  honestly  admire  her  and  she  has  re- 
mained for  him,  as  an  artist,  the  only 
personality  that  he  has  been  able  whole- 
heartedly to  admire.  He  found  in  her 
something  stronger  than  man  and  he  must 
have  triumphed  in  the  contemplation  of  the 
dominion  that  she  could  exercise,  if  she 
would,  over  the  tyrannies  that  he  had  known 
in  his  childhood. 

10 


BIOGRAPHY 


He  found,  too,  in  her  service,  the  type  of 
man  who,  most  strongly,  appealed  to  him. 
He  had  known  a  world  composed  of  threats, 
fugitive  rebellions,  wild  outbursts  of  defiance, 
inefficient  struggles  against  tyranny.  He 
was  in  the  company  now  of  those  who 
realised  so  completely  the  relationship  of 
themselves  and  their  duty  to  their  master 
and  their  service  that  there  was  simply 
nothing  to  be  said  about  it.  England  had, 
perhaps,  long  ago  called  to  him  with  her 
promise  of  freedom,  and  now  on  an  English 
ship  he  realised  the  practice  and  perform- 
ance of  that  freedom,  indulged  in,  as  it  was, 
with  the  fewest  possible  words.  Moreover, 
with  his  fund  of  romantic  imagination,  he 
must  have  been  pleased  by  the  contrast  of 
his  present  company,  men  who,  by  sheer 
lack  of  imagination,  ruled  and  served  the 
most  imaginative  force  in  nature.  The 
wonders  of  the  sea,  by  day  and  by  night, 
were  unnoticed  by  his  companions,  and  he 
admired  their  lack  of  vision.  Too  much 
vision  had  driven  his  country  under  the  heel 
of  Tyranny,  had  bred  in  himself  a  despair  of 
11 


JOSEPH  CONRAD 


any  possible  freedom  for  far-seeing  men; 
now  he  was  a  citizen  of  a  world  where  free- 
dom reigned  because  men  could  not  perceive 
how  it  could  be  otherwise ;  the  two  sides  of 
the  shield  were  revealed  to  him. 

Then,  towards  the  end  of  his  twenty  years' 
service  of  the  sea,  the  creative  impulse  in 
him  demanded  an  outlet.  He  wrote,  at 
stray  moments  of  opportunity  during  several 
years,  a  novel,  wrote  it  for  his  pleasure  and 
diversion,  sent  it  finally  to  a  publisher  with 
all  that  lack  of  confidence  in  posts  and 
publishers  that  every  author,  who  cares  for 
his  creations,  will  feel  to  the  end  of  his  days. 
He  has  said  that  if  Almayefs  Folly  had  been 
refused  he  would  never  have  written  again, 
but  we  may  well  believe  that,  let  the  fate  of 
that  book  be  what  it  might,  the  energy  and 
surprise  of  his  discovery  of  the  sea  must  have 
been  declared  to  the  world.  Almay&fs 
Fotty,  however,  was  not  rejected ;  its  pub- 
lication caused  The  Spectator  to  remark: 
"  The  name  of  Mr  Conrad  is  new  to  us,  but 
it  appears  to  us  as  if  he  might  become  the 
Kipling  of  the  Malay  Archipelago."  He 
12 


BIOGRAPHY 


had,  therefore,  encouragement  of  the  most 
dignified  kind  from  the  beginning.  He 
himself,  however,  may  have  possibly  re- 
garded that  day  in  1897  when  Henley 
accepted  The  Nigger  of  the  Narcissus  for 
The  New  Review  as  a  more  important  date 
in  his  new  career.  That  date  may  serve  for 
the  commencement  of  the  third  period  of 
his  adventure. 

The  quiet  atmosphere  of  the  England 
that  he  had  adopted  made  the  final,  almost 
inevitable  contrast  with  the  earlier  periods. 
With  such  a  country  behind  him  it  was 
possible  for  him  to  contemplate  in  peace 
the  whole  "  case "  of  his  earlier  life.  It 
was  as  a  "  case"  that  he  saw  it,  a  "  case" 
that  was  to  produce  all  those  other  "  cases  " 
that  were  his  books.  This  has  been  their 
history. 


His  books,  also,  find  naturally  a  division 
into  three  parts;  the  first  period,  begin- 
ning with  Almayer's  Folly  in  1895,  ended  with 
Lord  Jim  in  1900.  The  second  contains 

13 


JOSEPH  CONKAD 


the  two  volumes  of  Youth  and  Typhoon, 
the  novel  Romance  that  he  wrote  in  colla- 
boration with  Ford  Madox  Hueffer,  and 
ends  with  Nostromo,  published  in  1903.  The 
third  period  begins,  after  a  long  pause,  in 
1907  with  The  Secret  Agent,  and  receives  its 
climax  with  the  remarkable  popularity  of 
Chance  in  1914,  and  Victory  (1915). 

His  first  period  was  a  period  of  struggle, 
struggle  with  a  foreign  language,  struggle 
with  a  technique  that  was  always,  from  the 
point  of  view  of  the  "  schools,"  to  remain 
too  strong  for  him,  struggles  with  the  very 
force  and  power  of  his  reminiscences  that 
were  urging  themselves  upon  him,  now  at 
the  moment  of  their  contemplated  freedom, 
like  wild  beasts  behind  iron  bars.  Almayer's 
Folly  and  The  Outcast  of  the  Islands  (the 
first  of  these  is  sequel  to  the  second)  were 
remarkable  in  the  freshness  of  their  dis- 
covery of  a  new  world.  It  was  not  that 
their  world  had  not  been  found  before,  but 
rather  that  Conrad,  by  the  force  of  his  own 
individual  discovery,  proclaimed  his  find 
with  a  new  voice  and  a  new  vigour.  In  the 
U 


BIOGRAPHY 


character  of  Almayer,  of  Aissa,  of  Willems, 
of  Babalatchi  and  Abdulla  there  was  a  new 
psychology  that  gave  promise  of  great 
things.  Nevertheless  these  early  stories 
were  overcharged  with  atmosphere,  were 
clumsy  in  their  development  and  conveyed 
in  their  style  a  sense  of  rhetoric  and  lack 
of  ease.  His  vision  of  his  background  was 
pulled  out  beyond  its  natural  intensity  and 
his  own  desire  to  make  it  overwhelming 
was  so  obvious  as  to  frighten  the  creature 
into  a  determination  to  be,  simply  out  of 
malicious  perversity,  anything  else. 

These  two  novels  were  followed  by  a 
volume  of  short  stories,  Tales  of  Unrest, 
that  reveal,  quite  nakedly,  Conrad's  diffi- 
culties. One  study  in  this  book,  The 
Return,  with  its  redundancies  and  over- 
emphasis, is  the  cruelest  parody  on  its  author 
and  no  single  tale  in  the  volume  succeeds.  It 
was,  however,  as  though,  with  these  efforts, 
Conrad  flung  himself  free,  for  ever,  from  his 
apprenticeship;  there  appeared  in  1898 
what  remains  perhaps  still  his  most  perfect 
work,  The  Nigger  of  the  Narcissus.  This 
15 


JOSEPH  CONKAD 


was  a  story  entirely  of  the  sea,  of  the  voyage 
of  a  ship  from  port  to  port  and  of  the  in- 
fluence upon  that  ship  and  upon  the  human 
souls  that  she  contained,  of  the  approach- 
ing shadow  of  death,  an  influence  ironical, 
melancholy,  never  quite  horrible,  and  always 
tender  and  humorous.  Conrad  must  him- 
self have  loved,  beyond  all  other  vessels, 
the  Narcissus.  Never  again,  except  per- 
haps in  The  Mirror  of  the  Sea,  was  he  to  be 
so  happily  at  his  ease  with  any  of  his  sub- 
jects. The  book  is  a  gallery  of  remarkably 
distinct  and  authentic  portraits,  the  atmos- 
phere is  held  in  perfect  restraint,  and  the 
overhanging  theme  is  never,  for  an  instant, 
abandoned.  It  is,  above  all,  a  record 
of  lovingly  cherished  reminiscence.  Of 
cherished  reminiscence  also  was  the  book 
that  closed  the  first  period  of  his  work,  Lord 
Jim.  This  was  to  remain,  until  the  publica- 
tion of  Chance,  his  most  popular  novel.  It 
is  the  story  of  a  young  Englishman's  loss 
of  honour  in  a  moment  of  panic  and  his 
victorious  recovery.  The  first  half  of  the 
book  is  a  finely  sustained  development  of  a 
16 


vividly  remembered  scene,  the  second  half 
has  the  inevitability  of  a  moral  idea  pur- 
sued to  its  romantic  end  rather  than  the 
inevitability  of  life.  Here  then  in  1900 
Conrad  had  worked  himself  free  of  the  under- 
ground of  the  jungle  and  was  able  to  choose 
his  path.  His  choice  was  still  dictated  by 
the  subjects  that  he  remembered  most 
vividly,  but  upon  these  rewards  of  observa- 
tion his  creative  genius  was  working.  James 
Wait,  Donkin,  Jim,  Marlowe  were  men 
whom  he  had  known,  but  men  also  to  whom 
he  had  given  a  new  birth. 

There  appeared  now  in  Youth,  Heart  of 
Darkness  and  Typhoon  three  of  the  finest 
short  stories  in  the  English  language,  work 
of  reminiscence,  but  glowing  at  its  heart 
with  all  the  lyrical  exultation  and  flame  of  a 
passion  that  had  been  the  ruling  power  of  a 
life  that  was  now  to  be  abandoned.  That 
salutation  of  farewell  is  in  Youth  and  its 
evocation  of  the  East,  in  The  Heart  of  Dark- 
ness and  its  evocation  of  the  forests  that 
are  beyond  civilisation,  in  Typhoon  and  its 
evocation  of  the  sea.  He  was  never,  after 
B  17 


JOSEPH  CONRAD 


these  tales,  to  write  again  of  the  sea  as 
though  he  were  still  sailing  on  it.  From  this 
time  he  belonged,  with  regret  and  with  some 
ironic  contempt,  to  the  land. 

This  second  period  closed  with  the  pro- 
duction of  a  work  that  was  deliberately 
created  rather  than  reminiscent,  Nostromo. 
Conrad  may  have  known  Dr  Monyngham, 
Decoud,  Mrs  Gould,  old  Viola ;  but  they  be- 
came stronger  than  he  and,  in  their  com- 
pleted personalities,  owed  no  man  anything 
for  their  creation.  There  is  much  to  be  said 
about  Nostromo,  in  many  ways  the  greatest 
of  all  Conrad's  works,  but,  for  the  moment, 
one  would  only  say  that  its  appearance 
(it  appeared  first,  of  all  ironical  births,  in 
a  journal — T.P.'s  Weekly — and  astonished 
and  bewildered  its  readers  week  by  week, 
by  its  determination  not  to  finish  and  yield 
place  to  something  simpler)  caused  no  com- 
ment whatever,  that  its  critics  did  not 
understand  it,  and  its  author's  own  admirers 
were  puzzled  by  its  unlikeness  to  the  earlier 
sea  stories. 

Nostromo  was  followed  by  a  pause— one 
18 


BIOGRAPHY 


can  easily  imagine  that  its  production  did, 
for  a  moment,  utterly  exhaust  its  creator. 
When,  however,  in  1907  appeared  The  Secret 
Agent,  a  new  attitude  was  most  plainly 
visible.  He  was  suddenly  detached,  writing 
now  of  "  cases"  that  interested  him  as  an 
investigator  of  human  life,  but  called 
from  his  heart  no  burning  participation  of 
experience.  He  is  tender  towards  Winnie 
Verloc  and  her  old  mother,  the  two  women 
in  The  Secret  Agent,  but  he  studies  them 
quite  dispassionately.  That  love  that 
clothed  Jim  so  radiantly,  that  fierce  con- 
tempt that  in  An  Outcast  of  the  Islands 
accompanied  Willems  to  his  degraded  death, 
is  gone.  We  have  the  finer  artist,  but  we 
have  lost  something  of  that  earlier  com- 
pelling interest.  The  Secret  Agent  is  a  tale 
of  secret  service  in  London ;  it  contains  the 
wonderfully  created  figure  of  Verloc  and  it 
expresses,  to  the  full,  Conrad's  hatred  of 
those  rows  and  rows  of  bricks  and  mortar 
that  are  so  completely  accepted  by  un- 
imaginative men.  In  1911  Under  Western 
Eyes  spoke  strongly  of  a  Russian  influence 

19 


JOSEPH  CONKAD 


Turgeniev  and  Dostoievsky  had  too  markedly 
their  share  in  the  creation  of  Razumov  and 
the  cosmopolitan  circle  in  Geneva.  More- 
over, it  is  a  book  whose  heart  is  cold. 

A  volume  of  short  stories,  A  Set  of  Six, 
illustrating  still  more  emphatically  Conrad's 
new  detachment,  appeared  in  1908  and  is 
remarkable  chiefly  for  an  ironically  humor- 
ous story  of  the  Napoleonic  wars — The  Duel 
— a  tale  too  long,  perhaps,  but  admirable  for 
its  sustained  note.  In  1912  he  seemed,  in 
another  volume,  'Twixt  Land  and  Sea,  to 
unite  some  of  his  earlier  glow  with  all  his 
later  mastery  of  his  method.  A  Smile  of 
Fortune  and  The  Secret  Sharer  are  amazing 
in  the  beauty  of  retrospect  that  they  leave 
behind  them  in  the  soul  of  the  reader.  The 
sea  is  once  more  revealed  to  us,  but  it  is 
revealed  now  as  something  that  Conrad  has 
conquered.  His  contact  with  the  land  has 
taken  from  him  something  of  his  earlier 
intimacy  with  his  old  mistress.  Neverthe- 
less The  Secret  Sharer  is  a  most  marvellous 
story,  marvellous  in  its  completeness  of 
theme  and  treatment,  marvellous  in  the 
20 


BIOGRAPHY 


contrast  between  the  confined  limitations 
of  its  stage  and  the  vast  implications  of 
its  moral  idea.  Finally  in  1914  appeared 
Chance,  by  no  means  the  finest  of  his  books, 
but  catching  the  attention  and  admiration 
of  that  wider  audience  who  had  remained 
indifferent  to  the  force  and  beauty  of 
The  Nigger  of  the  Narcissus,  of  Lord  Jim, 
of  Nostromo.  With  the  popular  success  of 
Chance  the  first  period  of  his  work  is  closed. 
On  the  possible  results  of  that  popularity, 
their  effect  on  the  artist  and  on  the  whole 
world  of  men,  one  must  offer,  here  at  any 
rate,  no  prophecy. 

m 

To  any  reader  who  cares,  seriously,  to 
study  the  art  of  Joseph  Conrad,  no  better 
advice  could  be  offered  than  that  he  should 
begin  with  the  reading  of  the  two  volumes 
that  have  been  omitted  from  the  preceding 
list.  Some  Reminiscences  and  The  Mirror  oj 
the,  Sea  demand  consideration  on  the  threshold 
of  any  survey  of  this  author's  work,  because 

n 


JOSEPH  CONRAD 


they  reveal,  from  a  personal,  wilful  and  com- 
pletely anarchistic  angle,  the  individuality 
that  can  only  be  discovered,  afterwards, 
objectively,  in  the  process  of  creation. 

In  both  these  books  Conrad  is,  quite 
simply,  himself  for  anyone  who  cares  to 
read.  They  are  books  dictated  by  no  sense 
of  precedent  nor  form  nor  fashion.  They  are 
books  of  their  own  kind,  even  more  than  are 
the  novels.  Some  Reminiscences  has  only 
Tristram  Shandy  for  its  rival  in  the  business 
of  getting  everything  done  without  moving 
a  step  forward.  The  Mirror  of  the  Sea  has 
no  rival  at  all. 

We  may  suppose  that  the  author  did 
really  intend  to  write  his  reminiscences  when 
he  began.  He  found  a  moment  that  would 
make  a  good  starting-point,  a  moment  in 
the  writing  of  his  first  book,  Almayer^s 
Folly;  at  the  conclusion  or,  more  truly, 
cessation  of  Some  Reminiscences,  that 
moment  is  still  hanging  in  mid-air,  the  writ- 
ing of  Almayer  has  not  proceeded  two  lines 
farther  down  the  stage,  the  maid-servant  is 
still  standing  in  the  doorway,  the  hands  of 
22 


BIOGKAPHY 


the  clock  have  covered  five  minutes  of  the 
dial.  What  has  occurred  is  simply  that  the 
fascination  of  the  subject  has  been  too  strong. 
It  is  of  the  very  essence  of  Conrad's  art  that 
one  thing  so  powerfully  suggests  to  him 
another  that  to  start  him  on  anything  at  all 
is  a  tragedy,  because  life  is  so  short.  His 
reminiscences  would  be  easy  enough  to 
command  would  they  only  not  take  on  a  life 
of  their  own  and  shout  at  their  unfortunate 
author:  "Ah!  yes.  I'm  interesting,  of 
course,  but  don't  you  remember  .  .  .  ?  " 

The  whole  adventure  of  writing  his  first 
book  is  crowded  with  incident,  not  because 
he  considers  it  a  wonderful  book  or  himself 
a  marvellous  figure,  but  simply  because  any 
incident  in  the  world  must,  in  his  eyes,  be 
crowded  about  with  other  incidents.  There  is 
the  pen  one  wrote  the  book  with,  that  pen  that 

belonged  to  poor  old  Captain  B of  the 

Nonsuch  who  ...  or  there  is  the  window  just 
behind  the  writing-table  that  looked  out 
into  the  river,  that  river  that  reminds  one 
of  the  year  '88  when  .  .  . 

In  the  course  of  his  thrilling  voyage  of 
23 


JOSEPH  CONRAD 


discovery  we  are,  by  a  kind  of  most  blessed 
miracle,  told  something  of  Mr  Nicholas  B. 
and  of  the  author's  own  most  fascinating 
uncle.  We  even,  by  an  extension  of  the 
miracle,  learn  something  of  Conrad  as  ship's 
officer  (this  the  merest  glimpse)  and  as  a 
visitor  to  his  uncle's  house  in  Poland. 

So  by  chance  are  these  miraculous  facts 
and  glimpses  that  we  catch  at  them  with 
eager,  extended  hands,  praying,  imploring 
them  to  stay;  indeed  those  glimpses  may 
seem  to  us  the  more  wonderful  in  that  they 
have  been,  by  us,  only  partially  realised. 

Nevertheless,  in  spite  of  its  eager  incoher- 
ence, at  the  same  time  both  breathless,  and, 
by  the  virtue  of  its  author's  style,  solemn, 
we  do  obtain,  in  addition  to  our  glimpses  of 
Poland  and  the  sea,  one  or  two  revelations 
of  Conrad  himself.  Our  revelations  come  to 
us  partly  through  our  impression  of  his  own 
zest  for  life,  a  zest  always  ironical,  often 
sceptical,  but  always  eager  and  driven  by  a 
throbbing  impulse  of  vitality.  Partly  also 
through  certain  deliberate  utterances.  He 
tells  us: 

24 


BIOGKAPHY 


'  Those  who  read  me  know  my  conviction 
that  the  world,  the  temporal  world,  rests  on 
a  few  very  simple  ideas ;  so  simple  that  they 
must  be  as  old  as  the  hills.  It  rests,  notably, 
amongst  others,  on  the  idea  of  Fidelity.  At 
a  time  when  nothing  which  is  not  revolu- 
tionary in  some  way  or  other  can  expect  to 
attract  much  attention  I  have  not  been 
revolutionary  in  my  writings."  (Page  20.) 

Or  again: 

"  All  claim  to  special  righteousness 
awakens  in  me  that  scorn  and  anger  from 
which  a  philosophical  mind  should  be  free." 
(Page  21.) 

Or  again: 

"  Even  before  the  most  seductive  reveries 
I  have  remained  mindful  of  that  sobriety  of 
interior  life,  that  asceticism  of  sentiment,  in 
which  alone  the  naked  form  of  truth,  such 
as  one  conceives  it,  such  as  one  feels  it,  can 
be  rendered  without  shame."  (Page  194.) 

This  simplicity,  this  fidelity,  this  hatred 
of    self-assertion   and   self-satisfaction,   this 
sobriety — these  qualities  do  give  some  im- 
plication of  the  colour  of  the  work  that  will 
25 


JOSEPH  CONRAD 


arise  from  them ;  and  when  to  these  qualities 
we  add  that  before-mentioned  zest  and  vigour 
we  must  have  some  true  conception  of  the 
nature  of  the  work  that  he  was  to  do. 

It  is  for  this  that  Some  Reminiscences  is 
valuable.  To  read  it  as  a  detached  work, 
to  expect  from  it  the  amiable  facetiousness 
of  a  book  of  modern  memories  or  the  heavy 
authoritative  coherence  of  the  My  Auto- 
biography or  My  Life  of  some  eminent 
scientist  or  theologian,  is  to  be  most 
grievously  disappointed. 

If  the  beginning  is  bewilderment  the  end 
is  an  impression  of  crowding,  disordered  life, 
of  a  tapestry  richly  dark,  with  figures  woven 
into  the  very  thread  of  it  and  yet  starting  to 
life  with  an  individuality  all  their  own.  No 
book  reveals  more  clearly  the  reasons  both 
of  Conrad's  faults  and  of  his  merits.  No 
book  of  his  is  more  likely  by  reason  of  its 
honesty  and  simplicity  to  win  him  true 
friends.  As  a  work  of  art  there  is  almost 
everything  to  be  said  against  it,  except  that 
it  has  that  supreme  gift  that  remains,  at  the 
end,  almost  all  that  we  ask  of  any  work  of 
26 


BIOGRAPHY 


art,  overwhelming  vitality.  But  it  is  form- 
less, ragged,  incoherent,  inconclusive,  a 
fragment  of  eager,  vivid,  turbulent  reminis- 
cence poured  into  a  friend's  ear  in  a  moment 
of  sudden  confidence.  That  may  or  may 
not  be  the  best  way  to  conduct  reminis- 
cences; the  book  remains  a  supremely 
intimate,  engaging  and  enlightening  intro- 
duction to  its  author. 

With  The  Mirror  of  the  Sea  we  are  on  very 
different  ground.  As  I  have  already  said, 
this  is  Conrad's  happiest  book — indeed,  with 
the  possible  exception  of  The  Nigger  of  the 
Narcissus,  his  only  happy  book.  He  is 
happy  because  he  is  able,  for  a  moment,  to 
forget  his  distrust,  his  dread,  his  inherent 
ironical  pessimism.  He  is  here  permitting 
himself  the  whole  range  of  his  enthusiasm 
and  admiration,  and  behind  that  enthusiasm 
there  is  a  quiet,  sure  confidence  that  is 
strangely  at  variance  with  the  distrust  of 
his  later  novels. 

The  book  seems  at  first  sight  to  be  a 
collection  of  almost  haphazard  papers,  with 
such  titles  as  Landfalls  and  Departures, 
27 


JOSEPH  CONRAD 


Overdue  and  Missing,  Rulers  of  East  and 
West,  The  Nursery  of  the  Craft.  No  reader 
however,  can  conclude  it  without  having 
conveyed  to  him  a  strangely  binding  im- 
pression of  Unity.  He  has  been  led,  it  will 
seem  to  him,  into  the  very  heart  of  the 
company  of  those  who  know  the  Sea  as  she 
really  is,  he  has  been  made  free  of  a  great 
order. 

The  foundation  of  his  intimacy  springs 
from  three  sources — the  majesty,  power  and 
cruelty  of  the  Sea  herself,  the  homely  reality 
of  the  lives  of  the  men  who  serve  her,  the 
vibrating,  beautiful  life  of  the  ships  that  sail 
upon  her.  This  is  the  Trilogy  that  holds  in 
its  hands  the  whole  life  and  pageant  of  the 
sea;  it  is  because  Conrad  holds  all  three 
elements  in  exact  and  perfect  balance  that 
this  book  has  its  unique  value,  its  power 
both  of  realism,  for  this  is  the  life  of  man, 
and  of  romance,  which  is  the  life  of  the  sea. 

Conrad's  attitude  to  the  Sea  herself,  in 
this  book,  is  one  of  lyrical  and  passion- 
ate worship.  He  sees,  with  all  the  vivid 
accuracy  of  his  realism,  her  deceits,  her 


BIOGRAPHY 


cruelties,  her  inhuman  disregard  of  the  lives 
of  men,  but,  finally,  her  glory  is  enough  for 
him.  He  will  write  of  her  like  this : 

"  The  sea — this  truth  must  be  confessed — 
has  no  generosity.  No  display  of  manly  quali- 
ties— courage,  hardihood,  endurance,  faith- 
fulness— has  ever  been  known  to  touch  its 
irresponsible  consciousness  of  power.  The 
ocean  has  the  conscienceless  temper  of  a 
savage  autocrat  spoiled  by  much  adulation. 
He  cannot  brook  the  slightest  appearance  of 
defiance,  and  has  remained  the  irreconcil- 
able enemy  of  ships  and  men  ever  since  ships 
and  men  had  the  unheard-of  audacity  to  go 
afloat  together  in  the  face  of  his  frown  .  .  . 
the  most  amazing  wonder  of  the  deep  is  its 
unfathomable  cruelty." 

Nevertheless  she  holds  him  her  most  will- 
ing slave,  and  he  is  that  because  he  believes 
that  she  alone  in  all  the  world  is  worthy  to 
indulge  this  cruelty.  She  positively  "  brings 
it  off,"  this  assertion  of  her  right,  and  once 
he  is  assured  of  that,  he  will  yield  absolute 
obedience.  In  this  worship  of  the  Sea  and 
the  winds  that  rouse  her  he  allows  himself  a 

m 


JOSEPH  CONRAD 


lyrical  freedom  that  he  was  afterwards  to 
check.  He  was  never  again,  not  even  in 
Typhoon  and  Youth,  to  write  with  such  free 
and  spontaneous  lyricism  as  in  his  famous 
passage  about  the  "  West  Wind." 

The  Mirror  of  the  Sea  forms  then  the  best 
possible  introduction  to  Conrad's  work, 
because  it  attests,  more  magnificently  and 
more  confidently  than  anything  else  that  he 
has  written,  his  faith  and  his  devotion.  It 
presents  also,  however,  in  its  treatment  of 
the  second  element  of  his  subject,  the  men 
on  the  ships,  many  early  sketches  of  the 
characters  whom  he,  both  before  and  after- 
wards, developed  so  fully  in  his  novels. 
About  these  same  men  there  are  certain 
characteristics  to  be  noticed,  characteristics 
that  must  be  treated  more  fully  in  a  later 
analysis  of  Conrad's  creative  power,  but 
that  nevertheless  demand  some  mention 
here  as  witnesses  of  the  emotions,  the 
humours,  the  passions  that  he,  most  natur- 
ally, observes.  It  is,  in  the  first  place,  to  be 
marked  that  almost  all  the  men  upon  the 

sea,  from  "  poor  Captain  B ,  who  used 

30 


BIOGRAPHY 


to  suffer  from  sick  headaches,  in  his  young 
days,  every  time  he  was  approaching  a 
coast,"  to  the  dramatic  Dominic  ("  from 
the  slow,  imperturbable  gravity  of  that 
broad-chested  man  you  would  think  he  had 
never  smiled  in  his  life"),  are  silent  and 
thoughtful.  Granted  this  silence,  Conrad 
in  his  half-mournful,  half -humorous  survey, 
is  instantly  attracted  by  any  possible  con- 
trast. Captain  B dying  in  his  home, 

with  two  grave,  elderly  women  sitting  beside 
him  in  the  quiet  room,  "  his  eyes  resting 
fondly  upon  the  faces  in  the  room,  upon  the 
pictures  on  the  wall,  upon  all  the  familiar 
objects  of  that  home  whose  abiding  and 
clear  image  must  have  flashed  often  on  his 
memory  in  times  of  stress  and  anxiety  at 

sea"  -"poor   P ,"    with     'his    cheery 

temper,  his  admiration  for  the  jokes  in 
Punch,  his  little  oddities — like  his  strange 
passion  for  borrowing  looking-glasses,  for 
instance "  —that  captain  who  "  did  every- 
thing with  an  air  which  put  your  attention  on 
the  alert  and  raised  your  expectations,  but  the 
result  somehow  was  always  on  stereotyped 
31 


JOSEPH  CONRAD 


lines,  unsuggestive,  empty  of  any  lesson  that 
one  could  lay  to  heart" — that  other  captain 
in  whom  "  through  a  touch  of  self-seeking 
that  modest  artist  of  solid  merit  became 
untrue  to  his  temperament "  —here  are  little 
sketches  for  those  portraits  that  afterwards 
we  are  to  know  so  well,  Marlowe,  Captain 
M 'Whirr,  Captain  Lingard,  Captain  Mitchell 
and  many  others.  Here  we  may  fancy 
that  his  eye  lingers  as  though  in  the  mere 
enumeration  of  little  oddities  and  contrasted 
qualities  he  sees  such  themes,  such  subjects, 
such  "  cases"  that  it  is  hard,  almost  beyond 
discipline,  to  leave  them.  Nevertheless 
they  have  to  be  left.  He  has  obtained  his 
broader  contrast  by  his  juxtaposition  of  the 
curious  muddled  jumble  of  the  human  life 
against  the  broad,  august  power  of  the  Sea 
— that  is  all  that  his  present  subject  de- 
mands, that  is  his  theme  and  his  picture. 

Not  all  his  theme,  however;  there  re- 
mains the  third  element  in  it,  the  soul  of  the 
ship.  It  is,  perhaps,  after  all,  with  the  life 
of  the  ship  that  The  Mirror  of  the  Sea, 
ultimately,  has  most  to  do. 
32 


BIOGRAPHY 


As  other  men  write  of  the  woman  they 
have  loved,  so  does  Conrad  write  of  his 
ships.  He  sees  them,  in  this  book  that  is 
so  especially  dedicated  to  their  pride  and 
beauty,  coloured  with  a  fine  glow  of  romance, 
but  nevertheless  he  realises  them  with  all 
the  accurate  detail  of  a  technician  who 
describes  his  craft.  You  may  learn  of  the 
raising  and  letting  go  of  an  anchor,  and  he 
will  tell  the  journalists  of  their  crime  in 
speaking  of  "  casting"  an  anchor  when  the 
true  technicality  is  "brought  up" — "to 
an  anchor"  understood.  In  the  chapter  on 
"  Yachts "  he  provides  as  much  technical 
detail  as  any  book  of  instruction  need  de- 
mand and  then  suddenly  there  come  these 
sentences — "  the  art  of  handling  ships  is 
finer,  perhaps,  than  the  art  of  handling 
men."  ..."  A  ship  is  a  creature  which  we 
have  brought  into  the  world,  as  it  were  on 
purpose  to  keep  us  up  to  mark." 

Indeed  it  is  the  ship  that  gives  that  final 

impression  of  unity,  of  which  I  have  already 

spoken,  to  the  book.     She  grows,  as  it  were, 

from  her  birth,  in  no  ordered  sequence  of 

o  33 


JOSEPH  CONKAD 


events,  but  admitting  us  ever  more  closely 
into  her  intimacy,  telling  us,  at  first  shyly, 
afterwards  more  boldly,  little  things  about 
herself,  confiding  to  us  her  trials,  appealing 
sometimes  to  our  admiration,  indulging 
sometimes  our  humour.  Conrad  is  tender 
to  her  as  he  is  to  nothing  human.  He 
watches  her  shy,  new,  in  the  dock,  "  her 
reputation  all  to  make  yet  in  the  talk  of  the 
seamen  who  were  to  share  their  life  with 
her."  ..."  She  looked  modest  to  me.  I 
imagined  her  diffident,  lying  very  quiet, 
with  her  side  nestling  shyly  against  the  wharf 
to  which  she  was  made  fast  with  very  new 
lines,  intimidated  by  the  company  of  her 
tried  and  experienced  sisters  already  familiar 
with  all  the  violences  of  the  ocean  and  the 
exacting  love  of  men." 

Her  friend  stands  there  on  the  quay  and 
bids  her  be  of  good  courage ;  he  salutes  her 
grace  and  spirit — he  echoes,  with  all  the 
implied  irony  of  contrast,  his  companion's 
"  Ships  are  all  right.  .  .  ." 

He  explains  the  many  kinds  of  ships  that 
there  are — the  rogues,  the  wickedly  malicious, 
34 


BIOGKAPHY 


the  sly,  the  benevolent,  the  proud,  the 
adventurous,  the  staid,  the  decorous.  For 
even  the  worst  of  these  he  has  indulgences 
that  he  would  never  offer  to  the  soul  of  man. 
He  cannot  be  severe  before  such  a  world  of 
fine  spirits. 

Finally,  in  the  episode  of  the  Tremolino 
and  her  tragic  end  (an  end  that  has  in  it  a 
suggestion  of  that  later  story,  Freya  of  the 
Seven  Islands),  in  that  sinister  adventure  of 
Dominic  and  the  vile  Caesar,  he  shows  us,  in 
miniature,  what  it  is  that  he  intends  to  do 
with  all  this  material.  He  gives  us  the  soul 
of  the  Tremolino,  the  soul  of  Dominic,  the 
soul  of  the  sea  upon  which  they  are  voyag- 
ing. Without  ever  deserting  the  realism 
upon  which  he  builds  his  foundations  he 
raises  upon  it  his  house  of  romance. 

This  book  remains  by  far  the  easiest,  the 
kindest,  the  most  friendly  of  all  his  books. 
He  has  been  troubled  here  by  no  questions 
of  form,  of  creation,  of  development,  whether 
of  character  or  of  incident. 

It  is  the  best  of  all  possible  prologues  to 
his  more  creative  work. 
35 


n 

THE  NOVELIST 


IN  discussing  the  art  of  any  novelist 
as  distinct  from  the  poet  or  essayist 
there  are  three  special  questions  that 
we  may  ask — as  to  the  Theme,  as  to  the 
Form,  as  to  the  creation  of  Character. 

It  is  possible  to  discuss  these  three  ques- 
tions in  terms  that  can  be  applied,  in  no 
fashion  whatever,  to  the  poem  or  the  essay, 
although  the  novel  may  often  more  truly 
belong  to  the  essay  or  the  poem  to  the  novel, 
as,  for  instance,  The  Ring  and  the  Book  and 
Aurora  Leigh  bear  witness.  All  such  ques- 
tions of  ultimate  classes  and  divisions  are 
vain,  but  these  three  divisions  of  Theme, 
Form  and  Character  do  cover  many  of  the 
questions  that  are  to  be  asked  about  any 
novelist  simply  in  his  position  as  novelist 
36 


THE  NOVELIST 


and  nothing  else.  That  Joseph  Conrad  is, 
in  his  art,  most  truly  poet  as  well  as  novelist 
no  reader  of  his  work  will  deny.  I  wish, 
in  this  chapter,  to  consider  him  simply  as 
a  novelist — that  is,  as  a  narrator  of  the 
histories  of  certian  human  beings,  with  his 
attitude  to  those  histories. 

Concerning  the  form  of  the  novel  the 
English  novelists,  until  the  seventies  and 
eighties  of  the  nineteenth  century,  worried 
themselves  but  slightly.  If  they  con- 
sidered the  matter  they  chuckled  over  their 
deliberate  freedom,  as  did  Sterne  and 
Fielding.  Scott  considered  story-telling  a 
jolly  business  in  which  one  was,  also,  happily 
able  to  make  a  fine  living,  but  he  never 
contemplated  the  matter  with  any  respect. 
Jane  Austen,  who  had  as  much  form  as 
any  modern  novelist,  was  quite  unaware  of 
her  happy  possession.  The  mid- Victorians 
gloriously  abandoned  themselves  to  the  rich 
independence  of  shilling  numbers,  a  fashion 
which  forbade  Form  as  completely  as  the 
manners  of  the  time  forbade  frankness.  A 
new  period  began  at  the  end  of  the  fifties; 
37 


JOSEPH  CONRAD 


but  no  one  in  1861  was  aware  that  a  novel 
called  Evan  Harrington  was  of  any  special 
importance;  it  made  no  more  stir  than 
did  Air/flayer's  Folly  in  the  early  nineties, 
although  the  wonderful  Richard  Feverel  had 
already  preceded  it. 

With  the  coming  of  George  Meredith  and 
Thomas  Hardy  the  Form  of  the  novel, 
springing  straight  from  the  shores  of  France, 
where  Madame  Bovary  and  Une  Vie  showed 
what  might  be  done  by  taking  trouble,  grew 
into  a  question  of  considerable  import. 
Robert  Louis  Stevenson  showed  how  im- 
portant it  was  to  say  things  agreeably,  even 
when  you  had  not  very  much  to  say.  Henry 
James  showed  that  there  was  so  much  to 
say  about  everything  that  you  could  not 
possibly  get  to  the  end  of  it,  and  Rudyard 
Kipling  showed  that  the  great  thing  was  to 
see  things  as  they  were.  At  the  beginning 
of  the  nineties  everyone  was  immensely 
busied  over  the  way  that  things  were  done. 
The  Yellow  Book  sprang  into  a  bright  exist- 
ence, flamed,  and  died.  "Art  for  Art's  sake" 
was  slain  by  the  trial  of  Oscar  Wilde  in  1895. 
38 


THE  NOVELIST 


Mr  Wells,  in  addition  to  fantastic  romances, 
wrote  stories  about  shop  assistants  and 
knew  something  about  biology.  The  Fabian 
Society  made  socialism  entertaining.  Mr 
Bernard  Shaw  foreshadowed  a  new  period 
and  the  Boer  War  completed  an  old  one. 

Of  the  whole  question  of  Conrad's  place 
in  the  history  of  the  English  novel  and  his 
influence  upon  it  I  wish  to  speak  in  a  later 
chapter.  I  would  simply  say  here  that  if  he 
was  borne  in  upon  the  wind  of  the  French 
influence  he  was  himself,  in  later  years,  one 
of  the  chief  agents  in  its  destruction,  but, 
beginning  to  write  in  English  as  he  did  in 
the  time  of  The  Yellow  Book,  passing 
through  all  the  realistic  reaction  that  fol- 
lowed the  collapse  of  aestheticism,  seeing  the 
old  period  washed  away  by  the  storm  of 
the  Boer  War,  he  had,  especially  prepared 
for  him,  a  new  stage  upon  which  to  labour. 
The  time  and  the  season  were  ideal  for  the 
work  that  he  had  to  do. 


JOSEPH  CONRAD 


ii 

The  form  in  which  Conrad  has  chosen 
to  develop  his  narratives  is  the  question 
which  must  always  come  first  in  any  con- 
sideration of  him  as  a  novelist ;  the  question 
of  his  form  is  the  ground  upon  which  he  has 
been  most  frequently  attacked. 

His  difficulties  in  this  matter  have  all 
arisen,  as  I  have  already  suggested,  from  his 
absorbing  interest  in  life.  Let  us  imagine, 
for  an  instant,  an  imaginary  case.  He  has 
seen  in  some  foreign  port  a  quarrel  between 
two  seamen.  One  has  "  knifed  "  the  other, 
and  the  quarrel  has  been  watched,  with 
complete  indifference,  by  a  young  girl  and 
a  bibulous  old  wastrel  who  is  obviously  a 
relation  both  of  hers  and  of  the  stricken  sea- 
man. The  author  sees  here  a  case  for  his 
art  and,  wishing  to  give  us  the  matter  with 
the  greatest  possible  truth  and  accuracy, 
he  begins,  oratio  recta,  by  the  narration  of 
a  little  barber  whose  shop  is  just  over  the 
spot  where  the  quarrel  took  place  and  whose 
lodgers  the  old  man  and  the  girl  are.  He 
40 


THE  NOVELIST 


describes  the  little  barber  and  is,  at  once, 
amazed  by  the  interesting  facts  that  he  dis- 
covers about  the  man.  Seen  standing  in 
his  doorway  he  is  the  most  ordinary  little 
figure,  but  once  investigate  his  case  and  you 
find  a  strange  contrast  between  his  melan- 
choly romanticism  and  the  flashing  fanati- 
cism of  his  love  for  the  young  girl  who  lodges 
with  him.  That  leads  one  back,  through 
many  years,  to  the  moment  of  his  first 
meeting  with  the  bibulous  old  man,  and 
for  a  witness  of  that  we  must  hunt  out  a 
villainous  old  woman  who  keeps  a  drinking 
saloon  in  another  part  of  the  town.  This  old 
woman,  now  so  drink-sodden  and  degraded, 
had  once  a  history  of  her  own.  Once  she 
was  .  .  . 

And  so  the  matter  continues.  It  is  not 
so  much  a  deliberate  evocation  of  the  most 
difficult  of  methods,  this  manner  of  narra- 
tion, as  a  poignant  witness  to  Conrad's  own 
breathless  surprise  at  his  discoveries.  Mr 
Henry  James,  speaking  of  this  enforced 
collection  of  oratorical  witnesses,  says: 
l'  It  places  Mr  Conrad  absolutely  alone  as  a 


JOSEPH  CONKAD 


votary  of  the  way  to  do  a  thing  that  shall 
make  it  undergo  most  doing,"  and  his 
amazement  at  Conrad's  patient  pursuit  of 
unneeded  difficulties  may  seem  to  us  the 
stranger  if  we  consider  that  in  What  Maisie 
Knew  and  The  Awkward  Age  he  has  practised 
almost  precisely  the  same  form  himself. 
Indeed  beside  the  intricate  but  masterly 
form  of  The  Awkward  Age  the  duplicate 
narration  of  Chance  seems  child's-play. 
Mr  Henry  James  makes  the  mistake  of 
speaking  as  though  Conrad  had  quite  de- 
liberately chosen  the  form  of  narration  that 
was  most  difficult  to  him,  simply  for  the  fun 
of  overcoming  the  difficulties,  the  truth  being 
that  he  has  chosen  the  easiest,  the  form  of 
narration  brought  straight  from  the  sea  and 
the  ships  that  he  adored,  the  form  of  narra- 
tion used  by  the  Ancient  Mariner  and  all 
the  seamen  before  and  after  him.  Conrad 
must  have  his  direct  narrator,  because  that 
is  the  way  in  which  stories  in  the  past  had 
generally  come  to  him.  He  wishes  to  deny 
the  effect  of  that  direct  and  simple  honesty 
that  had  always  seemed  so  attractive  to 
42 


THE  NOVELIST 


him.  He  must  have  it  by  word  of  mouth, 
because  it  is  by  word  of  mouth  that  he 
himself  has  always  demanded  it,  and  if  one 
witness  is  not  enough  for  the  truth  of  it  then 
must  he  have  two  or  three. 

Consider  for  a  moment  the  form  of  three 
of  his  most  important  novels:  Lord  Jim, 
Nostromo  and  Chance.  It  is  possible  that 
Lord  Jim  was  conceived  originally  as  a 
sketch  of  character,  derived  by  the  author 
from  one  scene  that  was,  in  all  probability, 
an  actual  reminiscence.  Certainly,  when 
the  book  is  finished,  one  scene  beyond  all 
others  remains  with  the  reader;  the  scene 
of  the  inquiry  into  the  loss  of  the  Patna,  or 
rather  the  vision  of  Jim  and  his  appalling 
companions  waiting  outside  for  the  inquiry 
to  begin.  Simply  in  the  contemplation  of 
these  four  men  Conrad  has  his  desired  con- 
trast ;  the  skipper  of  the  Patna  :  "  He  made 
me  think  of  a  trained  baby  elephant  walk- 
ing on  hind-legs.  He  was  extravagantly 
gorgeous  too — got  up  in  a  soiled  sleeping- 
suit,  bright  green  and  deep  orange  vertical 
stripes,  with  a  pair  of  ragged  straw  slippers 
43 


JOSEPH  CONRAD 


on  his  bare  feet,  and  somebody's  cast-off 
pith  hat,  very  dirty  and  two  sizes  too  small 
for  him,  tied  up  with  a  manilla  rope-yarn 
on  the  top  of  his  big  head."  There  are  also 
two  other  "  no-account  chaps  with  him  " — 
a  sallow-faced  mean  little  chap  with  his  arm 
in  a  sling,  and  a  long  individual  in  a  blue 
flannel  coat,  as  dry  as  a  chip  and  no  stouter 
than  a  broomstick,  with  drooping  grey 
moustaches,  who  looked  about  him  with 
an  air  of  jaunty  imbecility,  and,  with  these 
three,  Jim,  "  clean-limbed,  clean-faced,  firm 
on  his  feet,  as  promising  a  boy  as  the  sun 
ever  shone  on."  Here  are  these  four,  in  the 
same  box,  condemned  for  ever  by  all  right- 
thinking  men.  That  boy  in  the  same  box 
as  those  obscene  scoundrels !  At  once  the 
artist  has  fastened  on  to  his  subject,  it 
bristles  with  active,  vital  possibilities  and 
discoveries.  We,  the  observers,  share  the 
artist's  thrill.  We  watch  our  author  dart 
upon  a  subject  with  the  excitement  of 
adventurers  discovering  a  gold  mine.  How 
much  will  it  yield  ?  How  deep  will  it  go  ? 
We  are  thrilled  with  the  suspense. 
44 


THE  NOVELIST 


Conrad,  having  discovered  his  subject, 
must,  for  the  satisfaction  of  that  honour 
which  is  his  most  deeply  cherished  virtue, 
prove  to  us  his  authenticity.  "  I  was  not 
there  myself,"  he  tells  us,  "  but4!  can  show 
you  someone  who  was."  He  introduces  us 
to  a  first-hand  witness,  Marlowe  or  another. 
"  Now  tell  your  story."  He  has  at  once 
the  atmosphere  in  which  he  is  happiest,  and 
so,  having  his  audience  clustered  about  him, 
unlimited  time  at  everyone's  disposal, 
whiskies  and  cigars  without  stint,  he  lets 
himself  go.  He  is  bothered  now  by  no 
question  but  the  thorough  investigation  of 
his  discovery.  What  had  Jim  done  that  he 
should  be  in  such  a  case?  We  must  have 
the  story  of  the  loss  of  the  Patna,  that 
marvellous  journey  across  the  waters,  all  the 
world  of  the  pilgrims,  the  obscene  captain 
and  Jim's  fine,  chivalrous  soul.  Marlowe  is 
inexhaustible.  He  has  so  much  to  say  and 
so  many  fine  words  in  which  to  say  it.  At 
present,  so  absorbed  are  we,  so  successful 
is  he,  that  we  are  completely  held.  The 
illusion  is  perfect.  We  come  to  the  inquiry. 
46 


JOSEPH  CONRAD 


One  of  the  judges  is  Captain  Brierley. 
"  What !  not  know  Captain  Brierley !  Ah ! 
but  I  must  tell  you!  Most  extraordinary 
thing ! " 

""  The  world  grows  around  us ;  a  world  that 
can  contain  the  captain  of  the  Patna, 
Brierley  and  Jim  at  the  same  time!  The 
subject  before  us  seems  now  so  rich  that  we 
are  expecting  to  see  it  burst,  at  any  moment, 
in  the  author's  hands,  but  so  long  as  that 
first  visualised  scene  is  the  centre  of  the 
episode,  so  long  as  the  experience  hovers 
round  that  inquiry  and  the  Esplanade  out- 
side it,  we  are  held,  breathless  and  believing. 
We  believe  even  in  the  eloquent  Marlowe. 
Then  the  moment  passes.  Every  possible 
probe  into  its  heart  has  been  made.  We  are 
satisfied. 

'  There  follows  then  the  sequel,  and  here 
at  once  the  weakness  of  the  method  is 
apparent.  {The  author  having  created  his 
narrator  must  continue  with  him.  Mar- 
lowe is  there,  untired,  eager,  waiting  to 
begin  again.  But  the  trouble  is  that  we  are 
no  longer  assured  now  of  the  truth  and 
46 


THE  NOVELIST 


reality  of  his  story.  He  saw — we  cannot 
for  an  instant  doubt  it — that  group  on  the 
Esplanade ;  all  that  he  could  tell  us  about 
that  we,  breathlessly,  awaited.  But  now 
we  are  uncertain  whether  he  is  not  invent- 
ing a  romantic  sequel.  He  must  go  on— 
that  is  the  truly  terrible  thing  about  Mar- 
lowe— and  at  the  moment  when  we  question 
his  authenticity  we  jre  suspjcipus  of  his 
very  existence,  ready  to  be  irritated  by  his 
flow  of  words  demanding  something  more 
authentic  than  that  voice  that  is  now  only 
dimly  heard.  The  author  himself  perhaps 
feels  this ;  he  duplicates,  he  even  trebles  his 
narrators  and  with  each  fresh  agent  raises 
a  fresh  crop  of  facts,  contrasts,  habits  and 
histories.  That  then  is  the  peril  of  the 
method.  Whilst  we  believe  we  are  com- 
pletely held,  but  let  the  authenticity  waver 
for  a  moment  and  the  danger  of  disaster  is 
more  excessive  than  with  any  other  possible 
form  of  narration.  Create  your  authority 
and  we  have  at  once  someone  at  whom  we 
may  throw  stones  if  we  are  not  beguiled. 
Marlowe  has  certainly  been  compelled  to 
47 


JOSEPH  CONRAD 


face,  at  moments  in  his  career,  an  angry, 
irritated  audience. 

Nostromo  is,  for  the  reason  that  we  never 
lose  our  confidence  in  the  narrator,  a  triumph- 
ant vindication  of  these  methods.  That  is 
not  to  deny  that  Nostromo  is  extremely 
confused  in  places,  but  it  is  a  confusion 
that  arises  rather  from  Conrad's  confidence 
in  the  reader's  fore-knowledge  of  the  facts 
than  in  a  complication  of  narrations.  The 
narrations  are  sometimes  complicated — old 
Captain  Mitchell  does  not  always  achieve 
authenticity — but  on  the  whole  the  reader 
may  be  said  to  be  puzzled,  simply  because 
he  is  told  so  much  about  some  things  and  so 
little  about  others. 

But  this  assurance  of  the  author's  that  we 
must  have  already  learnt  the  main  facts  of 
the  case  comes  from  his  own  convinced 
sense  of  the  reality  of  it.  This  time  he  has 
no  Marlowe.  He  was  there  himself.  "  Of 
course,"  he  says  to  us,  "  you  know  all  about 
that  revolution  in  Sulaco,  that  revolution 
that  the  Goulds  were  mixed  up  with.  Well, 
I  happened  to  be  there  myself.  I  know  all 
48 


THE  NOVELIST 


the  people  concerned,  and  the  central  figure 
was  not  Gould,  nor  Mitchell,  nor  Monyng- 
ham — no,  it  was  a  man  about  whom  no  one 
outside  the  republic  was  told  a  syllable.  I 
knew  the  man  well.  .  .  .  He  ..."  and 
there  we  all  are. 

The  method  is,  in  this  case,  as  I  have 
already  said,  completely  successful.  There 
may  be  confusions,  there  may  be  scenes 
concerning  which  we  may  be  expected  to  be 
told  much  and  are,  in  truth,  told  nothing  at 
all,  but  these  confusions  and  omissions  do, 
in  the  end,  only  add  to  our  conviction  of 
the  veracity  of  it.  No  one,  after  a  faithful 
perusal  of  Nostromo,  can  possibly  doubt  of 
the  existence  of  Sulaco,  of  the  silver  mine, 
of  Nostromo  and  Decoud,  of  Mrs  Gould, 
Antonio,  the  Viola  girls,  of  old  Viola,  Hirsch, 
Monyngham,  Gould,  Sotillo,  of  the  death  of 
Viola's  wife,  of  the  expedition  at  night  in 
the  painter,  of  Decoud  alone  on  the  Isabels, 
of  Hirsch' s  torture,  of  Captain  Mitchell's 
watch — here  are  characters  the  most 
romantic  in  the  world,  scenes  that  would 
surely,  in  any  other  hands,  be  fantastic 
D  49 


JOSEPH  CONRAD 


melodrama,  and  both  characters  and  scenes 
are  absolutely  supported  on  the  foundation 
of  realistic  truth.  Not  for  a  moment  from 
the  first  page  to  the  last  do  we  consciously 
doubt  the  author's  word.  .  .  .  Here  the 
form  of  narration  is  vindicated  because  it  is 
entirely  convincing. 

Not  so  with  the  third  example,  Chance. 
Here,  as  with  Lord  Jim,  we  may  find  one 
visualised  moment  that  stands  for  the  whole 
book  and  as  in  the  earlier  work  we  look 
back  and  see  the  degraded  officers  of  the 
Patna  waiting  with  Jim  on  the  Esplanade, 
so  our  glance  back  over  Chance  reveals  to 
us  that  moment  when  the  Fynes,  from  the 
security  of  their  comfortable  home,  watch 
Flora  de  Barrel  flying  down  the  steps  of 
her  horrible  Brighton  house  as  though  the 
Furies  pursued  her.  That  desperate  flight 
is  the  key  of  the  book.  The  moment  of 
the  chivalrous  Captain  Anthony's  rescue  of 
Flora  from  a  world  too  villainous  for  her 
and  too  double-faced  for  him  gives  the 
book's  theme,  and  never  in  all  the  stories 
that  preceded  Flora's  has  Conrad  been  so 
50 


THE  NOVELIST 


eager  to  afford  us  first-hand  witnesses.  We 
have,  in  the  first  place,  the  unquenchable 
Marlowe  sitting,  with  fine  phrases  at  his  lips, 
in  a  riverside  inn.  To  him  enter  Powell, 
who  once  served  with  Captain  Anthony; 
to  these  two  add  the  little  Fynes;  there 
surely  you  have  enough  to  secure  your 
alliance.  But  it  is  precisely  the  number  of 
witnesses  that  frightens  us.  Marlowe,  un- 
aided, would  have  been  enough  for  us,  more 
than  enough  if  we  are  to  consider  the  author 
himself  as  a  possible  narrator.  But  not 
only  does  the  number  frighten  us,  it  posi- 
tively hides  from  us  the  figures  of  Captain 
Anthony  and  Flora  de  Barrel.  Both  the 
Knight  and  the  Maiden  —as  the  author 
names  them — are  retiring  souls,  and  our 
hearts  move  in  sympathy  for  them  as  we 
contemplate  their  timid  hesitancy  before 
the  voluble  inquisitions  of  Marlowe,  young 
Powell  and  the  Fynes.  Moreover,  the  in- 
tention of  this  method  that  it  should  secure 
realistic  conviction  for  the  most  romantic 
episodes  does  not  here  achieve  its  purpose, 
as  we  have  seen  that  it  did  in  the  first  half  of 
51 


JOSEPH  CONKAD 


Lord  Jim  and  the  whole  of  Nostromo.  We 
believe  most  emphatically  in  that  first 
narration  of  young  Powell's  about  his  first 
chance.  We  believe  in  the  first  narration  of 
Marlowe,  although  quite  casually  he  talks 
like  this :  "  I  do  not  even  think  that  there 
was  in  what  he  did  a  conscious  and  lofty  con- 
fidence in  himself,  a  particularly  pronounced 
sense  of  power  which  leads  men  so  often  into 
impossible  or  equivocal  situations."  We 
believe  in  the  horrible  governess  (a  fiercely 
drawn  figure).  We  believe  in  Marlowe's 
interview  with  Flora  on  the  pavement  out- 
side Anthony's  room. 

We  believe  in  the  whole  of  the  first  half  of 
the  book,  but  even  here  we  are  conscious 
that  we  would  prefer  to  be  closer  to  the  whole 
thing,  that  it  would  be  pleasant  to  hear 
Flora  and  Anthony  speak  for  themselves, 
that  we  resent,  a  little,  Marlowe's  intimacy 
which  prevents,  with  patronising  com- 
plaisance, the  intimacy  that  we,  the  readers, 
might  have  secured.  Nevertheless  we  are 
so  far  held,  we  are  captured. 

But  when  the  second  half  of  the  book 
52 


THE  NOVELIST 


arrives  we  can  be  confident  no  longer. 
Here,  as  in  Lord  Jim,  it  is  possible  to  feel 
that  Conrad,  having  surprised,  seized  upon, 
mastered  his  original  moment,  did  not  know 
how  to  continue  it.  The  true  thing  in  Lord 
Jim  is  the  affair  of  the  Patna  ;  the  true  thing 
in  Chance  is  Captain  Anthony's  rescue  of 
Flora  after  her  disaster.  But  whereas  in 
Lord  Jim  the  sequel  to  Jim's  cowardice  has 
its  own  fine  qualities  of  beauty  and  imagina- 
tion, the  sequel  to  Captain  Anthony's  rescue 
of  Flora  seems  to  one  listener  at  any  rate 
a  pitiably  unconvincing  climax  of  huddled 
melodrama.  That  chapter  in  Chance  en- 
titled A  Moonless  Night  is,  in  the  first 
half  of  it,  surely  the  worst  thing  that 
Conrad  ever  wrote,  save  only  that  one  early 
short  story,  The  Return.  The  conclusion 
of  Chance  and  certain  tales  in  his  volume, 
Within  the  Tides,  make  one  wonder  whether 
that  alliance  between  romance  and  realism 
that  he  has  hitherto  so  wonderfully  main- 
tained is  not  breaking  down  before  the 
baleful  strength  of  the  former  of  these  two 
qualities. 

63 


JOSEPH  CONRAD 


It  remains  only  to  be  said  that  when 
credence  so  entirely  fails,  as  it  must  before 
the  end  of  Chance,  the  form  of  narration  in 
Oratio  Recta  is  nothing  less  than  maddening. 
Suddenly  we  do  not  believe  in  Marlowe,  in 
Powell,  in  the  Pynes :  we  do  not  believe  even 
in  Anthony  and  Flora.  We  are  the  angrier 
because  earlier  in  the  evening  we  were  so 
completely  taken  in.  It  is  as  though  we  had 
given  our  money  to  a  deserving  cause  and 
discovered  a  charlatan. 

I  have  described  at  length  the  form  in 
which  the  themes  of  these  books  are  developed, 
because  it  is  the  form  that,  here  extensively, 
here  quite  unobtrusively,  clothes  all  the 
novels  and  tales.  We  are  caught  and  held 
by  the  skinny  finger  of  the  Ancient  Mariner. 
When  he  has  a  true  tale  to  tell  us  his  veri- 
table presence  is  an  added  zest  to  our  pleasure. 
But,  if  his  presence  be  not  true  .  .  . 

m 

If  we  turn  to  the  themes  that  engage 
Joseph  Conrad's  attention  we  shall  see  that 
54 


THE  NOVELIST 


in  almost  every  case  his  subjects  are  con- 
cerned with  unequal  combats — unequal  to 
his  own  far-seeing  vision,  but  never  to  the 
human  souls  engaged  in  them,  and  it  is  this 
consciousness  of  the  blindness  that  renders 
men's  honesty  and  heroism  of  so  little 
account  that  gives  occasion  for  his  irony. 
He  chooses,  in  almost  every  case,  the  most 
solid  and  unimaginative  of  human  beings  for 
his  heroes,  and  it  seems  that  it  is  these  men 
alone  whom  he  can  admire.  "  If  a  human 
soul  has  vision  he  simply  gives  the  thing  up," 
we  can  hear  him  say.  "  He  can  see  at  once 
that  the  odds  are  too  strong  for  him.  But 
these  simple  souls,  with  their  consciousness 
of  the  job  before  them  and  nothing  else,  with 
their  placid  sense  of  honour  and  of  duty, 
upon  them  you  may  loosen  all  heaven's  bolts 
and  lightnings  and  they  will  not  quail." 
They  command  his  pity,  his  reverence,  his 
tenderness,  almost  his  love.  But  at  the  end, 
with  an  ironic  shrug  of  his  shoulders,  he  says : 
"  You  see.  I  told  you  so.  He  may  even 
think  he  has  won.  We  know  better,  you 
and  L" 

66 


JOSEPH  CONRAD 


The  theme  of  Almayer's  Folly  is  a  struggle 
of  a  weak  man  against  nature,  of  The  Nigger 
of  the  Narcissus  the  struggle  of  many  simple 
men  against  the  presence  of  death,  of  Lord 
Jim,  again,  the  struggle  of  a  simple  man 
against  nature  (here  the  man  wins,  but  only, 
we  feel,  at  the  cost  of  truth).  Nostromo,  the 
conquest  of  a  child  of  nature  by  the  silver 
mine  which  stands  over  him,  conscious  of 
its  ultimate  victory,  from  the  very  first. 
Chance,  the  struggle  of  an  absolutely  simple 
and  upright  soul  against  the  dishonesties 
of  a  world  that  he  does  not  understand. 
Typhoon,  the  very  epitome  of  Conrad's 
themes,  is  the  struggle  of  M'Whirr  against 
the  storm  (here  again  it  is  M' Whirr  who 
apparently  wins,  but  we  can  hear,  in  the 
very  last  line  of  the  book,  the  storm's  con- 
fident chuckle  of  ultimate  victory).  In 
Heart  of  Darkness  the  victory  is  to  the  forest. 
In  The  End  of  the  Tether  Captain  Whalley, 
one  of  Conrad's  finest  figures,  is  beaten  by 
the  very  loftiness  of  his  character.  The 
three  tales  in  'Twist  Land  and  Sea  are  all 
themes  of  this  kind — the  struggle  of  simple, 
56 


THE  NOVELIST 


unimaginative  men  against  forces  too  strong 
for  them.  In  The  Secret  Agent  Winnie 
Verloc,  another  simple  character,  finds  life 
too  much  for  her  and  commits  suicide.  In 
Under  Western  Eyes  Razumov,  the  dreamer, 
is  destroyed  by  a  world  that  laughs  at 
the  pains  and  struggles  of  insignificant 
individuals. 

Of  Conrad's  philosophy  I  must  speak  in 
another  place :  here  it  is  enough  to  say  that 
it  is  impossible  to  imagine  him  choosing  as 
the  character  of  a  story  jolly,  independent 
souls  who  take  life  for  what  it  gives  them 
and  leave  defeat  or  victory  to  the  stars. 

Whatever  Conrad's  books  are  or  are  not, 
it  may  safely  be  said  that  they  are  never 
jolly,  and  his  most  devoted  disciple  would, 
in  all  probability,  resent  any  suggestion  of  a 
lighter  hand  or  a  gentler  affection.  His  art, 
nevertheless,  is  limited  by  this  persistent 
brooding  over  the  inequality  of  life's  battle. 
His  humour,  often  of  a  very  fine  kind,  is 
always  sinister,  because  his  choice  of  theme 
forbids  light-heartedness. 

Tom  Jones  and  Tristram  Shandy  would 
57 


JOSEPH  CONRAD 


have  found  Marlowe,  Jim  and  Captain 
Anthony  quite  impossibly  solemn  company 
—but  I  do  not  deny  that  they  might  not 
have  been  something  the  better  for  a  little 
of  it. 

I  have  already  said  that  his  characters 
are,  for  the  most  part,  simple  and  unim- 
aginative men,  but  that  does  not  mean  that 
they  are  so  simple  that  there  is  nothing  in 
them.  The  first  thing  of  which  one  is  sure 
in  meeting  a  number  of  Conrad's  characters 
is  that  they  have  existences  and  histories 
entirely  independent  of  their  introducer's 
kind  offices.  Conrad  has  met  them,  has 
talked  to  them,  has  come  to  know  them,  but 
we  are  sure  not  only  that  there  is  very 
much  more  that  he  could  tell  us  about  them 
if  he  had  time  and  space,  but  that  even  when 
he  had  told  us  all  that  he  knew  he  would 
only  have  touched  on  the  fringe  of  their  real 
histories. 

One    of    the    distinctions    between    the 

modern  English  novel  and  the  mid- Victorian 

English   nove    is  that   modern  characters 

have  but  little  of  the  robust  vitality  of  their 

68 


THE  NOVELIST 


predecessors;  the  figures  in  the  novel  of 
to-day  fade  so  easily  from  the  page  that 
endeavours  to  keep  them. 

In  the  novels  of  Mr  Henry  James  we  feeJ 
at  times  that  the  characters  fade  before  the 
motives  attributed  to  them,  in  those  of  Mr 
Wells  before  an  idea,  a  curse,  or  a  remedy, 
in  those  of  Mr  Bennett  before  a  creeping 
wilderness  of  important  insignificances,  in 
those  of  Mr  Galsworthy  before  the  oppression 
of  social  inequalities,  in  those  of  Mrs  Wharton 
before  the  shadow  of  Mr  Henry  James,  even 
in  those  of  Mr  Hardy  before  the  omnipo- 
tence of  an  inevitable  God  whom,  in  spite 
of  his  inevitability,  Mr  Hardy  himself  is 
arranging  in  the  background;  it  may  be 
claimed  for  the  characters  of  Mr  Conrad  that 
they  yield  their  solidity  to  no  force,  no 
power,  not  even  to  their  author's  own  deter- 
mination that  they  are  doomed,  in  the  end, 
to  defeat. 

This  is  not  for  a  moment  to  say  that 

Joseph  Conrad  is  a  finer  novelist  than  these 

others,  but  this  quality  he  has  beyond  his 

contemporaries — namely,  the  assurance  that 

59 


JOSEPH  CONRAD 


his  characters  have  their  lives  and  adven- 
tures both  before  and  after  the  especial 
cases  that  he  is  describing  to  us. 

The  Russian  Tchekov  has,  in  his  plays, 
this  gift  supremely,  so  that  at  the  close  of 
The  Three  Sisters  or  The  Cherry  Orchard  we 
are  left  speculating  deeply  upon  "  what 
happened  afterwards  "  to  Gayef  or  Barbara, 
to  Masha  or  Epikhadov ;  with  Conrad's  sea 
captains  as  with  Tchekov' s  Russians  we  see 
at  once  that  they  are  entirely  indepen  ent 
of  the  incidents  that  we  are  told  about  them. 
This  independence  springs  partly  from  the 
author's  eager,  almost  naive  curiosity.  It 
is  impossible  for  him  to  introduce  us  to  any 
officer  on  his  ship  without  whispering  to  us 
in  an  aside  details  about  his  life,  his  wife 
and  family  on  shore.  By  so  doing  he  forges 
an  extra  link  in  his  chain  of  circumstantial 
evidence,  but  we  do  not  feel  that  here  he  is 
deliberately  serving  his  art — it  is  only  that 
quality  already  mentioned,  his  own  astonished 
delight  at  the  things  that  he  is  discovering. 
We  learn,  for  instance,  about  Captain 
M' Whirr  that  he  wrote  long  letters  home, 
60 


THE  NOVELIST 


beginning  always  with  the  words,  "  My 
darling  Wife,"  and  relating  in  minute  detail 
each  successive  trip  of  the  Nan-Shan.  Mrs 
M'Whirr,  we  learn,  was  "  a  pretentious 
person  with  a  scraggy  neck  and  a  disdain- 
ful manner,  admittedly  lady-like  and  in 
the  neighbourhood  considered  as  *  quite 
superior.'  The  only  secret  of  her  life  was 
her  abject  terror  of  the  time  when  her 
husband  would  come  home  to  stay  for 
good."  Also  in  Typhoon  there  is  the  second 
mate  "  who  never  wrote  any  letters,  did  not 
seem  to  hope  for  news  from  anywhere ;  and 
though  he  had  been  heard  once  to  mention 
West  Hartlepool,  it  was  with  extreme  bitter- 
ness, and  only  in  connection  with  the  ex- 
tortionate charges  of  a  boarding-house." 
How  conscious  we  are  of  Jim's  English 
country  parsonage,  of  Captain  Anthony's 
loneliness,  of  Marlowe's  isolation  i  By  this 
simple  thread  of  connection  between  the 
land  and  the  ship  the  whole  character 
stands,  human  and  convincing,  before  us. 
Of  the  sailors  on  board  the  Narcissus  there 
is  not  one  about  whom,  after  his  landing, 
61 


JOSEPH  CONRAD 


we  are  not  curious.  There  is  the  skipper, 
whose  wife  comes  on  board,  "  A  real  lady, 
in  a  black  dress  and  with  a  parasol." 
..."  Very  soon  the  captain,  dressed  very 
smartly  and  in  a  white  shirt,  went  with  her 
over  the  side.  We  didn't  recognise  him  at 
all.  .  .  ."  And  Mr  Baker,  the  chief  mate ! 
Is  not  this  little  farewell  enough  to  make 
us  his  friends  for  life  ? 

"  No  one  waited  for  him  ashore.  Mother 
died;  father  and  two  brothers,  Yarmouth 
fishermen,  drowned  together  on  the  Dogger 
Bank ;  sister  married  and  unfriendly.  Quite 
a  lady,  married  to  the  leading  tailor  of  a  little 
town,  and  its  leading  politician,  who  did  not 
think  his  sailor  brother-in-law  quite  respect- 
able enough  for  him.  Quite  a  lady,  quite  a 
lady,  he  thought,  sitting  down  for  a  moment's 
rest  on  the  quarter-hatch.  Time  enough  to 
go  ashore  and  get  a  bite,  and  sup,  and  a  bed 
somewhere.  He  didn't  like  to  part  with  a 
ship.  No  one  to  think  about  then.  The 
darkness  of  a  misty  evening  fell,  cold  and 
damp,  upon  the  deserted  deck;  and  Mr 
Baker  sat  smoking,  thinking  of  all  the 
successive  ships  to  whom  through  many 
62 


THE  NOVELIST 


long  years  he  had  given  the  best  of  a 
seaman's  care.  And  never  a  command  in 
sight.  Not  once !  " 

There  are  others — the  abominable  Don- 
kin  for  instance.  "  Donkin  entered.  They 
discussed  the  account  .  .  .  Captain  Allis- 
toun  paid.  '  I  give  you  a  bad  discharge,' 
he  said  quietly.  Donkin  raised  his  voice: 
*  I  don't  want  your  bloomin'  discharge — 
keep  it.  I'm  goin'  ter  'ave  a  job  hashore.' 
He  turned  to  us.  '  No  more  bloomin'  sea 
for  me,'  he  said,  aloud.  All  looked  at  him. 
He  had  better  clothes,  had  an  easy  air, 
appeared  more  at  home  than  any  of  us ;  he 
stared  with  assurance,  enjoying  the  effect  of 
his  declaration." 

In  how  many  novels  would  Donkin' s  life 
have  been  limited  by  the  part  that  he  was 
required  to  play  in  the  adventures  of  the 
Narcissus  ?  As  it  is  our  interest  in  his  pro- 
gress has  been  satisfied  by  a  prologue  only. 
Or  there  is  Charley,  the  boy  of  the  crew — 
"  As  I  came  up  I  saw  a  red-faced,  blowzy 
woman,  in  a  grey  shawl,  and  with  dusty, 
63 


JOSEPH  CONKAD 


fluffy  hair,  fall  on  Charley's  neck.  It  was 
his  mother.  She  slobbered  over  him: — 
'  Oh,  my  boy !  my  boy ! '  — '  Leggo  me,' 
said  Charley,  c  leggo,  mother ! '  I  was 
passing  him  at  the  time,  and  over  the  untidy 
head  of  the  blubbering  woman  he  gave  me  a 
humorous  smile  and  a  glance  ironic,  courage- 
ous, and  profound,  that  seemed  to  put  all 
my  knowledge  of  life  to  shame.  I  nodded 
and  passed  on,  but  heard  him  say  again, 
good-naturedly : — '  If  you  leggo  of  me  this 
minyt — ye  shall  'ave  a  bob  for  a  drink  out  of 
my  pay.' ' 

But  one  passes  from  these  men  of  the  sea 
—from  M' Whirr  and  Baker,  from  Lingard 
and  Captain  Whalley,  from  Captain  Anthony 
and  Jim,  with  a  suspicion  that  the  author 
will  not  convince  us  quite  so  readily  with  his 
men  of  the  land — and  that  suspicion  is 
never  entirely  dismissed.  About  such  men 
as  M'Whirr  and  Baker  he  can  tell  us  nothing 
that  we  will  not  believe.  He  has  such  sym- 
pathy and  understanding  for  them  that 
they  will,  we  are  assured,  deliver  up  to  him 
their  dearest  secrets — those  little  details, 
64 


THE  NOVELIST 


W Whirr's  wife,  Mr  Baker's  proud  sister, 
Charley's  mother,  are  their  dearest  secrets. 
But  with  the  citizens  of  the  other  world — 
with  Stein,  Decoud,  Gould,  Verloc,  Razumov, 
the  sinister  Nikita,  the  little  Fynes,  even  the 
great  Nostromo  himself — we  cannot  be  so 
confident,  simply  because  their  discoverer 
cannot  yield  them  that  same  perfect 
sympathy. 

His  theory  about  these  men  is  that  they 
have,  all  of  them,  an  idee  fixe,  that  you 
must  search  for  this  patiently,  honestly,  un- 
sparingly— having  found  it,  the  soul  of  the 
man  is  revealed  to  you.  But  is  it?  Is  it 
not  possible  that  Decoud  or  Verloc,  feeling 
the  probing  finger,  offer  up  instantly  any 
idee  fixe  ready  to  hand  because  they  wish  to 
be  left  alone  ?  Decoud  himself,  for  instance 
—Decoud,  the  imaginative  journalist  in 
Nostromo,  speculating  with  his  ironic  mind 
upon  romantic  features,  at  his  heart,  appar- 
ently cynical  and  reserved,  the  burning 
passion  for  the  beautiful  Antonia.  He  has 
yielded  enough  to  suggest  the  truth,  but  the 
truth  itself  eludes  us.  With  Verloc  again 
E  65 


JOSEPH  CONEAD 


we  have  a  quite  masterly  presentation  of 
the  man  as  Conrad  sees  him.  That  first 
description  of  him  is  wonderful,  both  in 
its  reality  and  its  significance.  "  His  eyes 
were  naturally  heavy,  he  had  an  air  of 
having  wallowed,  fully  dressed,  all  day  on 
an  unmade  bed." 

With  many  novelists  that  would  be  quite 
enough,  that  we  should  see  the  character  as 
the  author  sees  him,  but  because,  in  these 
histories,  we  have  the  convictions  of  the 
extension  of  the  protagonists'  lives  beyond 
the  stated  episodes,  it  is  not  enough.  Be- 
cause they  have  lives  independent  of  the 
covers  of  the  book  we  feel  that  there  can  be 
no  end  to  the  things  that  we  should  be  told 
about  them,  and  they  must  be  true  things. 

Verloc,  for  instance,  is  attached  from  the 
first  to  his  idee  face — namely,  that  he  should 
be  able  to  retain,  at  all  costs,  his  phlegmatic 
state  of  self-indulgence  and  should  not  be 
jockeyed  out  of  it.  At  the  first  sign  of 
threatened  change  he  is  terrified  to  his  very 
soul.  Conrad  never,  for  an  instant,  allows 
him  to  leave  this  ground  upon  which  he  has 
66 


THE  NOVELIST 


placed  him.  We  see  the  man  tied  to  his 
rock  of  an  idee  fixe,  but  he  has,  nevertheless, 
we  are  assured,  another  life,  other  motives, 
other  humours,  other  terrors.  It  is  perhaps 
a  direct  tribute  to  the  author's  reserve 
power  that  we  feel,  at  the  book's  close,  that 
we  should  have  been  told  so  much  more. 

Even  with  the  great  Nostromo  himself  we 
are  not  satisfied  as  we  are  with  Captain 
Whalley  or  Mr  Bates.  Nostromo  is  surely, 
as  a  picture,  the  most  romantically  satisfy- 
ing figure  in  the  English  novel  since  Scott, 
with  the  single  exception  of  Thackeray's 
Beatrix — and  here  I  am  not  forgetting 
Captain  Silver,  David  Balfour,  Catriona, 
nor,  in  our  own  immediate  time,  young 
Beauchamp  or  the  hero  of  that  amazing  and 
so  unjustly  obscure  fiction,  The  Shadow  of  a 
Titan.  As  a  picture,  Nostromo  shines  with 
a  flaming  colour,  shines,  as  the  whole  novel 
shines,  with  a  glow  that  is  flung  by  the  con- 
trasted balance  of  its  romance  and  realism. 
From  that  first  vision  of  him  as  he  rides 
slowly  through  the  crowds,  in  his  magnificent 
dress :  "...  his  hat,  a  gay  sombrero  with 
67 


JOSEPH  CONRAD 


a  silver  cord  and  tassels.  The  bright  colours 
of  a  Mexican  scrape  twisted  on  the  cantle, 
the  enormous  silver  buttons  on  the  em- 
broidered leather  jacket,  the  row  of  tiny 
silver  buttons  down  the  seam  of  the  trousers, 
the  snowy  linen,  a  silk  sash  with  embroidered 
ends,  the  silver  plates  on  headstall  and 
saddle  .  .  ."  to  that  last  moment  when — 
" .  .  .  in  the  dimly  lit  room  Nostromo  rolled 
his  head  slowly  on  the  pillow  and  opened  his 
eyes,  directing  at  the  weird  figure  perched 
by  his  bedside  a  glance  of  enigmatic  and 
mocking  scorn.  Then  his  head  rolled  back, 
his  eyelids  fell,  and  the  Capatos  of  the  Car- 
gadores  died  without  a  word  or  moan  after 
an  hour  of  immobility,  broken  by  short 
shudders  testifying  to  the  most  atrocious 
sufferings"  —we  are  conscious  of  his  superb 
figure;  and  after  his  death  we  do,  indeed, 
believe  what  the  last  lines  of  the  book 
assure  us — "  In  that  true  cry  of  love  and 
grief  that  seemed  to  ring  aloud  from  Punta 
Mala  to  Azuera  and  away  to  the  bright  line 
of  the  horizon,  overhung  by  a  big  white 
cloud  shining  like  a  mass  of  solid  silver,  the 


THE  NOVELIST 


genius  of  the  magnificent  Capatuz  de  Car- 
gadores  dominated  the  dark  gulf  containing 
Lis  conquests  of  treasure  and  love."  His 
genius  dominates,  yes — but  it  is  the  genius 
of  a  magnificent  picture  standing  as  a 
frontispiece  to  the  book  of  his  soul.  And 
that  soul  is  not  given  us — Nostromo,  proud 
to  the  last,  refuses  to  surrender  it  to  us. 
Why  is  it  that  the  slender  sketch  of  old 
Singleton  in  The  Nigger  of  the  Narcissus 
gives  us  the  very  heart  of  the  man,  so  that 
volumes  might  tell  us  more  of  him  indeed, 
but  could  not  surrender  him  to  us  more 
truly,  and  all  the  fine  summoning  of  Nos- 
tromo only  leaves  him  beyond  our  grasp  ? 
We  believe  in  Nostromo,  but  we  are  told 
about  him — we  have  not  met  him. 

Nevertheless,  at  another  turn  of  the  road, 
this  criticism  must  seem  the  basest  in- 
gratitude. When  we  look  back  and  survey 
that  crowd,  so  various,  so  distinct  whether 
it  be  they  who  are  busied,  before  our  eyes, 
with  the  daily  life  of  Sulaco,  or  the  Verloc 
family  (the  most  poignant  scene  in  the 
whole  of  Conrad's  art — the  drive  in  the 
69 


JOSEPH  CONRAD 


cab  of  old  Mrs  Verloc,  Winnie  and  Stevie 
— compels,  additionally,  our  gratitude)  or 
that  strange  gathering,  the  Haldins,  Nikita, 

Laspara,  Madame  de  S ,  Peter  Ivanovitch, 

Razumov,  at  Geneva,  or  the  highly  coloured 
figures  in  Romance  (a  book  fine  in  some 
places,  astonishingly  second-rate  in  others), 
Falk  or  Amy  Foster,  Jacobus  and  his 
daughter,  Jasper  and  his  lover,  all  these  and 
so  many,  many  more,  what  can  we  do  but 
embrace  the  world  that  is  offered  to  us, 
accept  it  as  an  axiom  of  life  that,  of  all  these 
figures,  some  will  be  near  to  us,  some  more 
distant?  It  is,  finally,  a  world  that  Con- 
rad offers  us,  not  a  series  of  novels  in  whose 
pages  we  find  the  same  two  or  three  figures 
returning  to  us — old  friends  with  new  faces 
and  new  names — but  a  planet  that  we  know, 
even  as  we  know  the  Meredith  planet,  the 
Hardy  planet,  the  James  planet. 

Looking  back,  we  may  trace  its  towns  and 
rivers,  its  continents  and  seas,  its  mean 
streets  and  deep  valleys,  its  country  houses, 
its  sordid  hovels,  its  vast,  untamed  forests, 
its  deserts  and  wilderness  s.  Although  each 
70 


THE  NOVELIST 


work,  from  the  vast  Nostromo  to  the 
minutely  perfect  Secret  Share,  has  its  new 
theme,  its  form,  its  separate  heart,  the 
swarming  life  that  he  has  created  knows  no 
boundary.  And  in  this,  surely,  creation  has 
accomplished  its  noblest  work. 


71 


m 

THE  POET 


THE  poet  in  Conrad  is  lyrical  as  well 
as  philosophic.     The  lyrical  side  is 
absent  in  certain  of  his  works,  as, 
for  example,  The  Secret  Agent,  and  Under 
Western  Eyes,  or  such  short  stories  as  The 
Informer,  or  II  Conde,  but  the  philosophic 
note  sounded  poetically,  as  an  instrumeut 
of  music  as  well  as  a  philosophy,  is  never 
absent. 

Three  elements  in  the  work  of  Conrad  the 
poet  as  distinct  from  Conrad  the  novelist 
deserve  consideration — style,  atmosphere 
and  philosophy.  In  the  matter  of  style  the 
first  point  that  must  strike  any  constant 
reader  of  the  novels  is  the  change  that  is  to 
be  marked  between  the  earlier  works  and  the 
later.  Here  is  a  descriptive  passage  from 
72 


THE  POET 


Conrad's   second   novel,  An  Outcast  of  the 
Islands : 

"  He  followed  her  step  by  step  till  at 
last  they  both  stopped,  facing  each  other 
under  the  big  tree  of  the  enclosure.  The 
solitary  exile  of  the  forests  great,  motion- 
less and  solemn  in  his  abandonment,  left 
alone  by  the  life  of  ages  that  had  been 
pushed  away  from  him  by  those  pigmies 
that  crept  at  his  foot,  towered  high  and 
straight  above  their  leader.  He  seemed  to 
look  on,  dispassionate  and  imposing  in  his 
lonely  greatness,  spreading  his  branches 
wide  in  a  gesture  of  lofty  protection,  as  if 
to  hide  them  in  the  sombre  shelter  of 
innumerable  leaves;  as  if  moved  by  the 
disdainful  compassion  of  the  strong,  by  the 
scornful  pity  of  an  aged  giant,  to  screen 
this  struggle  of  two  human  hearts  from  the 
cold  scrutiny  of  glittering  stars." 

And  from  his  latest  novel,  Chance : 

"  The  very  sea,  with  short  flashes  of  foam 
bursting  out  here  and  there  in  the  g  oomy 
distances,  the  unchangeable,  safe  sea 
sheltering  a  man  from  all  passions,  except 
its  own  anger,  seemed  queer  to  the  quick 
73 


JOSEPH  CONRAD 


glance  he  threw  to  windward  when  the 
already  effaced  horizon  traced  no  reassuring 
limit  to  the  eye.  In  the  expiring  diffused 
twilight,  and  before  the  clouded  night 
dropped  its  mysterious  veil,  it  was  the 
immensity  of  space  made  visible — almost 
palpable.  Young  Powell  felt  it.  He  felt 
it  in  the  sudden  sense  of  his  isolation;  the 
trustworthy,  powerful  ship  of  his  first  ac- 
quaintance reduced  to  a  speck,  to  some- 
thing almost  undistinguishable.  The  mere 
support  for  the  soles  of  his  two  feet  before 
that  unexpected  old  man  becoming  so 
suddenly  articulate  in  a  darkening  uni- 
verse." 

It  must  be  remembered  that  the  second 
of  these  quotations  is  the  voice  of 
Marlowe  and  that  therefore  it  should,  in 
necessity,  be  the  simpler  of  the  two.  Never- 
theless, the  distinction  can  very  clearly  be 
observed.  The  first  piece  of  prose  is  quite 
definitely  lyrical :  it  has,  it  cannot  be  denied, 
something  of  the  "  purple  patch/'  We  feel 
that  the  prose  is  too  dependent  upon  sonor- 
ous adjectives,  that  it  has  the  deliberation 
of  work  slightly  affected  by  the  author's 
74 


THE  POET 


determination  that  it  shall  be  fine.  The 
rhythm  in  it,  however,  is  as  deliberate  as  the 
rhythm  of  any  poem  in  English,  the  picture 
evoked  as  distinct  and  clear-cut  as  though  it 
were,  in  actual  fact,  a  poem  detached  from 
all  context  and,  finally,  there  is  the  inevit- 
able philosophical  implication  to  give  the 
argument  to  the  picture.  Such  passages  of 
descriptive  prose  may  be  found  again  and 
again  in  the  earlier  novels  and  tales  of  Con- 
rad, in  Almayer's  Folly,  Tales  of  Unrest,  The 
Nigger  of  the  Narcissus,  Typhoon,  Youth, 
Heart  of  Darkness,  Lord  Jim — prose  piled 
high  with  sonorous  and  slow-moving  adjec- 
tives, three  adjectives  to  a  noun,  prose  that 
sounds  like  an  Eastern  invocation  to  a  deity 
in  whom,  nevertheless,  the  suppliant  does 
not  believe.  At  its  worst,  the  strain  that  its 
sonority  places  upon  movements  and  objects 
of  no  importance  is  disastrous.  For  in- 
stance, in  the  tale  called  The  Return,  there 
is  the  following  passage:  — 

"  He  saw  her  shoulder  touch  the  lintel  of 
the  door.  She  swayed  as  if  dazed.  There  was 
75 


JOSEPH  CONRAD 


less  than  a  second  of  suspense  while  they  both 
felt  as  if  poised  on  the  very  edge  of  moral 
annihilation,  ready  to  fall  into  some  devouring 
nowhere.  Then  almost  simultaneously  he 
shouted,  '  Come  back,'  and  she  let  go  the 
handle  of  the  door.  She  turned  round  in 
peaceful  desperation  like  one  who  has 
deliberately  thrown  away  the  last  chance  of 
life;  and  for  a  moment  the  room  she  faced 
appeared  terrible,  and  dark,  and  safe — like 
a  grave." 

The  situation  here  simply  will  not  bear 
the  weight  of  the  words — "  moral  annihila- 
tion," "  devouring  nowhere,"  "  peaceful 
desperation,"  "  last  chance  of  life," 
"  terrible,"  "  like  a  grave."  That  he  shouted 
gives  a  final  touch  of  ludicrous  exaggera- 
tion to  the  whole  passage. 

Often,  in  the  earlier  books,  Conrad's  style 
has  the  awkward  over-emphasis  of  a  writer 
who  is  still  acquiring  the  language  that  he  is 
using,  like  a  foreigner  who  shouts  to  us  be- 
cause he  thinks  that  thus  we  shall  under- 
stand him  more  easily.  But  there  is  also, 
in  this  earlier  style,  the  marked  effect  of 
76 


two  influences.  One  influence  is  that  of 
the  French  language  and  especially  of  the 
author  of  Madame  Bovary.  When  we 
recollect  that  Conrad  hesitated  at  the  be- 
ginning of  his  career  as  to  whether  he  would 
write  in  French  or  English,  we  can  under- 
stand this  French  inflection.  Flaubert's 
effect  on  his  style  is  quite  unmistakable. 
This  is  a  sentence  of  Flaubert's:  "  Toutes 
ses  velleites  de  denigrement  Penvanouis- 
saient  sous  la  poesie  du  role  qui  Penvahis- 
sait;  et  entrainee  vers  Phomme  par  P illu- 
sion du  personnage  elle  tacha  de  se  figurer  sa 
vie,  cette  vie  retentissante,  extraordinaire, 
splendide  .  .  ."  and  this  a  sentence  of 
Conrad's:  "Her  hands  slipped  slowly  ofl 
Lingard's  shoulders  and  her  arms  fell  by 
her  side,  listless,  discouraged,  as  if  to  her — 
to  her,  the  savage,  violent  and  ignorant 
creature — had  been  revealed  clearly  in  that 
moment  the  tremendous  fact  of  our  isolation, 
of  the  loneliness,  impenetrable  and  trans- 
parent, elusive  and  everlasting." 

Conrad's  sentence  reads  like  a  direct  trans- 
lation from  the  French.    It  is  probable, 
77 


JOSEPH  CONRAD 


however,  that  his  debt  to  Flaubert  and  the 
French  language  can  be  very  easily  exag- 
gerated, and  it  does  not  seem,  in  any  case, 
to  have  driven  very  deeply  into  the  heart 
of  his  form.  The  influence  is  mainly  to  be 
detected  in  the  arrangement  of  words  and 
sentences  as  though  he  had,  in  the  first  years 
of  his  work,  used  it  as  a  crutch  before  he 
could  walk  alone. 

The  second  of  the  early  influences  upon 
his  style  is  of  far  greater  importance — the 
influence  of  the  vast,  unfettered  elements  of 
nature  that  he  had,  for  so  many  years,  so 
directly  served.  If  it  were  not  for  his  re- 
markable creative  gift  that  had  been,  from 
the  very  first,  at  its  full  strength,  his  early 
books  would  stand  as  purely  lyrical  evoca- 
tions of  the  sea  and  the  forest.  It  is  the 
poetry  of  the  Old  Testament  of  which  we 
think  in  many  pages  of  Almayer's  Folly  and 
An  Outcast  of  the  Island,  a  poetry  that  has 
the  rhythm  and  metre  of  a  spontaneous 
emotion.  He  was  never  again  to  catch 
quite  the  spirit  of  that  first  rapture. 

He  was  under  the  influence  of  these  powers 
78 


THE  POET 


also  in  that,  at  that  time,  they  were  too 
strong  for  him.  We  feel  with  him  that  he 
is  impotent  to  express  his  wonder  and  praise 
because  he  is  still  so  immediately  under  their 
sway.  His  style,  in  these  earlier  books,  has 
the  repetitions  and  extended  phrases  of  a 
man  who  is  marking  time  before  the  in- 
spired moment  comes  to  him — often  the 
inspiration  does  not  come  because  he  can- 
not detach  himself  with  sufficient  pause  and 
balance.  But  in  his  middle  period,  in  the 
period  of  youth,  Typhoon,  Heart  of  Darkness 
and  Nostromo,  this  lyrical  impulse  can  be 
seen  at  its  perfection,  beating,  steadily, 
spontaneously,  with  the  finest  freedom  and 
yet  disciplined,  as  it  were,  by  its  own  will 
and  desire.  Compare,  for  a  moment,  this 
passage  from  Typhoon  with  that  earlier  one 
from  The  Outcast  of  the  Islands  that  I  quoted 
above : 

"  He  watched  her,  battered  and  solitary, 
labouring  heavily  in  a  wild  scene  of  moun- 
tainous black  waters  lit  by  the  gleam 
of  distant  worlds.  She  moved  slow  y, 
breathing  into  the  still  core  of  the  hurricane 

79 


JOSEPH  CONRAD 


the  excess  of  her  strength  in  a  white  cloud  of 
steam,  and  the  deep-toned  vibration  of  the 
escape  was  like  the  defiant  trumpeting  of  a 
living  creature  of  the  sea  impatient  for  the 
renewal  of  the  contest.  It  ceased  suddenly. 
The  still  air  moaned.  Above  Jakes'  head 
a  few  stars  shone  into  the  pit  of  black 
vapours.  The  inky  edge  of  the  cloud-disc 
frowned  upon  the  ship  under  the  patch  of 
glittering  sky.  The  stars  too  seemed  to 
look  at  her  intently,  as  if  for  the  last  time, 
and  the  cluster  of  their  splendour  sat  like  a 
diadem  on  a  lowering  brow." 

That  is  poet's  work,  and  poet's  work  at 
its  finest.  Instead  of  impressing  us,  as  the 
earlier  piece  of  prose,  with  the  fact  that  the 
author  has  made  the  very  most  of  a  rather 
thin  moment — feels,  indeed,  himself  that  it 
is  thin — we  are  here  under  the  influence  of 
something  that  can  have  no  limits  to  the 
splendours  that  it  contains.  The  work  is 
thick,  as  though  it  had  been  wrought  by 
the  finest  workman  out  of  the  heart  of  the 
finest  material — and  yet  it  remains,  through 
all  its  discipline,  spontaneous. 

These  three  tales,  Typhoon,  Youth  and 
80 


THE  POET 


Heart  of  Darkness,  stand  by  themselves  as 
the  final  expression  of  Conrad's  lyrical  gift. 
We  may  remember  such  characters  as 
M'Whirr,  Kurtz,  Marlowe,  but  they  are 
figures  as  the  old  seneschal  in  The  Eve  of 
St  Agnes  or  the  Ancient  Mariner  himself  are 
figures.  They  are  as  surely  complete  poems, 
wrought  and  finished  in  the  true  spirit  of 
poetry,  as  Whitman's  When  Lilac  first  on 
the  Door-yard  bloomed  or  Keats'  Nightin- 
gale. Their  author  was  never  again  to 
succeed  so  completely  in  combining  the  free 
spirit  of  his  enthusiasm  with  the  disciplined 
restraint  of  the  true  artist. 

The  third  period  of  his  style  shows  him 
cool  and  clear-headed  as  to  the  things  that 
he  intends  to  do.  He  is  now  the  slightly 
ironic  artist  whose  business  is  to  get  things 
on  to  paper  in  the  clearest  possible  way.  He 
is  conscious  that  in  the  past  he  has  been  at 
the  mercy  of  sonorous  and  high-sounding 
adjectives.  He  will  use  them  still,  but  only 
to  show  them  that  they  are  at  his  mercy. 
Marlowe,  his  appointed  minister,  is  older — 
he  must  look  back  now  on  the  colours  of 
v  81 


JOSEPH  CONRAD 


Youth  with  an  indulgent  smile.  And  when 
Marlowe  is  absent,  in  such  novels  as  The 
Secret  Agent  and  Under  Western  Eyes,  in  such 
a  volume  of  stories  as  A  Set  of  Six,  the  lyrical 
beat  in  the  style  is  utterly  abandoned — we 
are  led  forward  by  sentences  as  grave,  as 
assured,  and  sometimes  as  ponderous  as  a 
city  policeman.  Nevertheless,  in  that  pass- 
age from  Chance  quoted  at  the  beginning 
of  the  chapter,  although  we  may  be  far 
from  the  undisciplined  enthusiasm  of  An 
Outcast  of  the  Islands,  the  lyrical  impulse  still 
remains.  Yes,  it  is  there,  but — "  Young 
Powell  felt  it."  In  that  magical  storm  that 
was  Typhoon  God  alone  can  share  our  terror 
and  demand  our  courage;  in  the  later 
experience  young  Powell  is  our  companion. 


n 

The  question  of  style  devolves  here 
directly  into  the  question  of  atmosphere. 
There  may  roughly  be  said  to  be  four  classes 
of  novelists  in  the  matter  of  atmosphere. 
There  is  the  novelist  who,  intent  upon  his 


THE  POET 


daily  bread  or  game  of  golf,  has  no  desire  to 
be  worried  by  such  a  perplexing  business.  He 
produces  stories  that  might  without  loss  play 
the  whole  of  their  action  in  the  waiting-room 
of  an  English  railway  station.  There  is  the 
novelist  who  thinks  that  atmosphere  matters 
immensely,  who  works  hard  to  produce  it 
and  does  produce  it  in  thick  slabs.  There 
are  the  novelists  whose  theme,  characters 
and  background  react  so  admirably  that  the 
atmosphere  is  provided  simply  by  that  re- 
action— and  there,  finally,  it  is  left,  put  into 
no  relation  with  other  atmospheres,  serving 
no  further  purpose  than  the  immediate  one 
of  stating  the  facts.  Of  this  school  are  the 
realists  and,  in  our  own  day,  Mr  Arnold 
Bennett's  Brighton  background  in  Hilda 
Lessways  or  Mrs  Wharton's  New  York  back- 
ground in  The  House  of  Mirth  offer  most 
successful  examples  of  such  realistic  work. 
The  fourth  class  provides  us  with  the 
novelists  who  wish  to  place  their  atmosphere 
in  relation  with  the  rest  of  life.  Our  im- 
agination is  awakened,  insens  bly,  by  the 
contemplation  of  some  scene  and  is  thence 

83 


JOSEPH  CONRAD 


extended  to  the  whole  vista  of  life,  from 
birth  to  death;  although  the  scene  may 
actually  be  as  remote  or  as  confined  as 
space  can  make  it,  its  potential  limits  are 
boundless,  its  progression  is  extended  be- 
yond all  possibilities  of  definition.  Such  a 
moment  is  the  death  of  Bazarov  in  Fathers 
and  Children,  the  searching  of  Dmitri  in  The 
Brothers  Karamazov,  the  scene  at  the  theatre 
in  The  Ring  and  the  Book,  the  London  meet- 
ing between  Beauchamp  and  Rene  in  Beau- 
champ's  Career.  It  is  not  only  that  these 
scenes  are  "  done  "  to  the  full  extent  of  their 
"  doing,' '  it  is  also  that  they  have  behind 
them  the  lyrical  impulse  that  unites  them 
with  all  the  emotion  and  beauty  in  the 
history  of  the  world;  Turgeniev,  Dostoiev- 
sky, Browning,  Meredith  were  amongst  the 
greatest  of  the  poets.  Conrad,  at  his  high- 
est moments,  is  also  of  that  company. 

But  it  is  not  enough  to  say  that  this 
potential  atmosphere  is  simply  lyrical.  Mr 
Chesterton,  in  his  breathless  Victorian  Age 
in  Literature,  has  named  this  element 
Glamour. 

84 


THE  POET 


In  writing  of  the  novels  by  George  Eliot 
he  says :  '  Indeed  there  is  almost  every 
element  of .  literature,  except  a  certain  in- 
describable thing  called  Glamour,  which 
was  the  whole  stock-in-trade  of  the  Brontes, 
which  we  feel  in  Dickens  when  Quilp 
clambers  amid  rotten  wood  by  the  desolate 
river ;  and  even  in  Thackeray,  when  Edmond 
wanders  like  some  swarthy  crow  about  the 
dismal  avenues  of  Castlewood."  Now  this 
matter  of  Glamour  is  not  all,  because  Dickens, 
for  instance,  is  not  at  all  potential.  His 
pictures  of  Quilp  or  the  house  of  the  Ded- 
locks  or  Jonas  Chuzzlewit's  escape  after 
the  murder  do  not  put  us  into  touch  with 
other  worlds  — but  we  may  say,  at  any 
rate,  that  when,  in  a  novel  atmosphere  is 
potentia',  it  is  certain  also  to  have  glamour. 

The  potential  qualities  of  Conrad's  atmos- 
phere are  amongst  his  very  strongest  gifts 
and,  if  we  investigate  the  matter,  we  see 
that  it  is  his  union  of  Romance  and  Realism 
that  gives  such  results.  Of  almost  no 
important  scene  in  his  novels  is  it  possible 
to  define  the  boundaries.  In  The  Outcast 
86 


JOSEPH  CONRAD 


of  the  Islands,  when  Willems  is  exiled 
by  Captain  Lingard,  the  terror  of  that 
forest  has  at  its  heart  not  only  the  actual 
terror  of  that  immediate  scene,  minutely 
and  realistically  described — it  has  also  the 
terror  of  all  our  knowledge  of  loneliness, 
desolation,  the  power  of  something  stronger 
than  ourselves.  In  Lord  Jim  the  contrast 
of  Jim  with  the  officers  of  the  Patna  is  a 
contrast  not  only  immediately  vital  and 
realised  to  the  very  fringe  of  the  captain's 
gay  and  soiled  pyjamas,  but  also  potential 
to  the  very  limits  of  our  ultimate  conception 
of  the  eternal  contrast  between  good  and 
evil,  degradation  and  vigour,  ugliness  and 
beauty.  In  The  Nigger  of  the  Narcissus  the 
death  of  the  negro,  James  Wait,  immedi- 
ately affects  the  lives  of  a  number  of  very 
ordinary  human  beings  whose  friends  and 
intimates  we  have  become — but  that  shadow 
that  traps  the  feet  of  the  negro,  that  alarms 
the  souls  of  Donkin,  of  Belfast,  of  Singleton, 
of  the  boy  Charlie,  creeps  also  to  our  sides 
and  envelops  for  us  far  more  than  that 
single  voyage  of  the  Narcissus. 
86 


THE  POET 


When  Winnie  Verloc,  her  old  mother  and 
the  boy  Stevie  take  their  journey  in  the  cab 
it  does  not  seem  ludicrous  to  us  that  the 
tears  of  "  that  large  female  in  a  dark,  dusty 
wig,  and  ancient  silk  dress  festooned  with 
dingy  white  cotton  lace  "  should  move  us  as 
though  Mrs  Verloc  were  our  nearest  friend. 
That  mournful  but  courageous  journey 
remains  in  our  mind  as  an  intimate  com- 
panion of  our  own  mournful  and  courageous 
experiences.  Such  examples  might  be  mul- 
tiplied quite  indefinitely. 

He  has  always  secured  his  atmosphere 
by  his  own  eager  curiosity  about  significant 
detail,  but  his  detail  is  significant,  not  be- 
cause he  wishes  to  impress  his  reader  with 
the  realism  of  his  picture,  but  rather  because 
he  s,  like  a  very  small  boy  in  a  strange  house, 
pursuing  the  most  romantic  adventures  for 
his  own  pleasure  and  excitement  only.  We 
may  hear,  with  many  novelists,  the  click  of 
satisfaction  with  which  they  drive  another 
nail  into  the  framework  that  supports  their 
picture.  "  Now  see  how  firmly  it  stands," 
they  say.  "  That  last  nail  settled  it."  But 
87 


JOSEPH  CONEAD 


Conrad  is  utterly  unconscious  as  to  his 
readers'  later  credulity — he  is  too  com- 
pletely held  by  his  own  amazing  dis- 
coveries. Sometimes,  as  in  The  Return, 
when  no  vision  is  granted  to  him,  it  is  as 
though  he  were  banging  on  a  brass  tray  with 
all  his  strength  so  that  no  one  should  per- 
ceive his  own  grievous  disappointment  at 
his  failure.  But,  in  his  real  discoveries,  how 
the  atmosphere  piles  itself  up,  around  and 
about  him,  how  we  follow  at  his  heels, 
penetrating  the  darkness,  trusting  to  his 
courage,  finding  ourselves  suddenly  blinded 
by  the  blaze  of  Aladdin's  cave !  If  he  is 
tracing  the  tragedy  of  Willems  and  Almayer, 
a  tragedy  that  has  for  its  natural  back- 
ground the  gorgeous,  heavy  splendour  of 
those  unending  forests,  he  sees  details  that 
belong  to  the  austerest  and  most  sharply 
disciplined  realism.  We  see  Lakamba, 
asleep  under  the  moon,  slapping  himself  in 
his  dreams  to  keep  off  the  mosquitoes;  a 
bluebottle  comes  buzzing  into  the  verandah 
above  the  dirty  plates  of  a  half -finished 
meal  and  defies  Longard  and  Almayer,  so 
88 


THE  POET 


that  they  are  like  men  disheartened  by  some 
tremendous  failure ;  the  cards  with  which 
Lingard  tries  to  build  a  house  for  Almayer's 
baby  are  "  a  dirty  double  pack  "  with  which 
he  used  to  play  Chinese  bezique — it  bored 
Almayer  but  the  old  seaman  delighted  in 
it,  considering  it  a  remarkable  product  of 
Chinese  genius.  The  atmosphere  of  the 
terrible  final  chapters  is  set  against  this 
picture  of  a  room  in  which  Mrs  Willems  is 
waiting  for  her  abominable  husband: 

"  Bits  of  white  stuff ;  rags  yellow,  pink, 
blue ;  rags  limp,  brilliant  and  soiled,  trailed 
on  the  floor,  lay  on  the  desk  amongst  the 
sombre  covers  of  books  soiled,  greasy,  but 
stiff-backed  in  virtue,  perhaps,  of  their 
European  origin.  The  biggest  set  of  book- 
shelves was  partly  hidden  by  a  petticoat,  the 
waistband  of  which  was  caught  upon  the 
back  of  a  slender  book  pulled  a  little  out  of 
the  row  so  as  to  make  an  improvised  clothes- 
peg.  The  folding  canvas  bedstead  stood 
anyhow,  parallel  to  no  wall,  as  if  it  had  been, 
in  the  process  of  transportation  to  some 
remote  place,  dropped  casually  there  by  tired 
bearers.  And  on  the  tumbled  blankets  that 


JOSEPH  CONRAD 


lay  in  a  disordered  heap  on  its  edge,  Joanna 
sat.  .  .  .  Through  the  half-open  shutter  a 
ray  of  sunlight,  a  ray  merciless  and  crude, 
came  into  the  room,  beat  in  the  early  morn- 
ing upon  the  safe  in  the  far-off  corner,  then, 
travelling  against  the  sun,  cut  at  midday 
the  big  desk  in  two  with  its  solid  and  clean- 
edged  brilliance ;  with  its  hot  brilliance  in 
which  a  swarm  of  flies  hovered  in  dancing 
flight  over  some  dirty  plate  forgotten  there 
amongst  yellow  papers  for  many  a  day  !" 

And  this  room  is  set  in  the  very  heart 
of  the  forests — "  the  forests  unattainable, 
enigmatical,  for  ever  beyond  reach  like  the 
stars  of  heaven — and  as  indifferent."  Had 
I  space  I  could  multiply  from  every  novel 
and  tale  examples  of  this  creation  of  atmos- 
phere by  the  juxtaposition  of  the  lyrical 
and  the  realistic — the  lyrical  pulse  beating 
through  realistic  detail  and  transforming  it. 
I  will,  however,  select  one  book,  a  supreme 
example  of  this  effect.  What  I  say  about 
Nostromo  may  be  proved  from  any  other 
work  of  Conrad's. 

The  theme  of  Nostromo  is  the  domination 
90 


THE  POET 


of  the  silver  of  the  Sulaco  mine  over  the 
bodies  and  souls  of  the  human  beings  who 
live  near  it.  The  light  of  the  silver  shines 
over  the  book.  It  is  typified  by  "  the  white 
head  of  Higuerota  rising  majestically  upon 
the  blue."  Conrad,  then,  in  choosing  his 
theme,  has  selected  the  most  romantic 
possible,  the  spirit  of  silver  treasure  luring 
men  on  desperately  to  adventure  and  to 
death.  His  atmosphere,  therefore,  is,  in  its 
highest  lights,  romantic,  even  until  that  last 
vision  of  all  of  "  the  bright  line  of  the 
horizon,  overhung  by  a  big  white  cloud 
shining  like  a  mass  of  solid  silver."  Sulaco 
burns  with  colour.  We  can  see,  as  though 
we  had  been  there  yesterday,  those  streets 
with  the  coaches,  "  great  family  arks  swayed 
on  high  leathern  springs  full  of  pretty 
powdered  faces  in  which  the  eyes  looked 
intensely  alive  and  black,"  the  houses, 
"  in  the  early  sunshine,  delicate  primrose, 
pale  pink,  pale  blue,"  or,  after  dark,  from 
Mrs  Gould's  balcony  "  towards  the  plaza 
end  of  the  street  the  glowing  coals  in  the 
hazeros  of  the  market  women  cooking  their 
91 


JOSEPH  CONEAD 


evening  meal  glowed  red  along  the  edge  of 
the  pavement.  A  man  appeared  without  a 
sound  in  the  light  of  a  street  lamp,  show- 
ing the  coloured  inverted  triangle  of  his 
broidered  poncho,  square  on  his  shoulders, 
hanging  to  a  point  below  his  knees.  From 
the  harbour  end  of  the  Calle  a  horseman 
walked  his  soft-stepping  mount,  gleaming 
silver-grey  abreast  each  lamp  under  the  dark 
shape  of  the  rider."  Later  there  is  that 
sinister  glimpse  of  the  plaza,  "  where  a 
patrol  of  cavalry  rode  round  and  round 
without  penetrating  into  the  streets  which 
resounded  with  shouts  and  the  strumming 
of  guitars  issuing  from  the  open  doors  of 
pulperias  .  .  .  and  above  the  roofs,  next 
to  the  perpendicular  lines  of  the  cathedral 
towers  the  snowy  curve  of  Higuerota 
blocked  a  large  space  of  darkening  blue  sky 
before  the  windows  of  the  Intendencia." 
In  its  final  created  beauty  Sulaco  is  as 
romantic,  as  coloured  as  one  of  those  cloud- 
topped,  many-towered  towns  under  whose 
gates  we  watch  Grimm's  princes  and 
princesses  passing — but  the  detail  of  it  is 
92 


THE  POET 


built  with  careful  realism  demanded  by  the 
"  architecture  of  Manchester  or  Birming- 
ham." We  wonder,  as  Sulaco  grows 
familiar  to  us,  as  we  realise  its  cathedral,  its 
squares  and  streets  and  houses,  its  slums, 
its  wharves,  its  sea,  its  hills  and  forests,  why 
it  is  that  other  novelists  have  not  created 
towns  for  us. 

Anthony  Trollope  did,  indeed,  give  us 
Barchester,  but  Barchester  is  a  shadow  be- 
side Sulaco.  Mr  Thomas  Hardy's  Wessex 
map  is  .the  most  fascinating  document  in 
modern  fiction,  with  the  possible  exception 
of  Stevenson's  chart  in  Treasure  Island. 
Conrad,  without  any  map  at  all,  gives  us  a 
familiarity  with  a  small  town  on  the  South 
American  coast  that  far  excels  our  know- 
ledge of  Barsetshire,  Wessex  and  John 
Silver's  treasure.  If  any  attentive  reader 
of  Nostromo  were  put  down  in  Sulaco  to- 
morrow he  would  feel  as  though  he  had 
returned  to  his  native  town.  The  detail 
that  provides  this  final  picture  is  throughout 
the  book  incessant  but  never  intruding. 
We  do  not  look  back,  when  the  novel  is 

M 


JOSEPH  CONRAD 


finished,  to  any  especial  moment  of  explana- 
tion or  introduction.  We  have  been  led, 
quite  unconsciously,  forward.  We  are  led, 
at  moments  of  the  deepest  drama,  through 
rooms  and  passages  that  are  only  remembered, 
many  hours  later,  in  retrospect.  There  is, 
for  instance,  the  Aristocratic  Club,  that 

"  extended  to  strangers  the  large  hospitality 
of  the  cool,  big  rooms  of  its  historic  quarters 
in  the  front  part  of  a  house,  once  a  residence 
of  a  high  official  of  the  Holy  Office.  The 
two  wings,  shut  up,  crumbled  behind  the 
nailed  doors,  and  what  may  be  described  as 
a  grove  of  young  orange-trees  grown  in  the 
unpaved  patio  concealed  the  utter  ruin  of 
the  back  part  facing  the  gate.  You  turned 
in  from  the  street,  as  if  entering  a  secluded 
orchard,  where  you  came  upon  the  foot  of 
a  disjointed  staircase,  guarded  by  a  moss- 
stained  effigy  of  some  saintly  bishop,  mitred 
and  staffed,  and  bearing  the  indignity  of  a 
broken  nose  meekly,  with  his  fine  stone 
hands  crossed  on  his  breast.  The  chocolate- 
coloured  faces  of  servants  with  mops  of 
black  hair  peeped  at  you  from  above ;  the 
click  of  billiard  balls  came  to  your  ears,  and, 
94 


THE  POET 


ascending  the  steps,  you  would  perhaps  see 
in  the  first  sala,  very  stiff  upon  a  straight- 
backed  chair,  in  a  good  light,  Don  Pepe 
moving  his  long  moustaches  as  he  spelt  his 
way,  at  arm's-length,  through  an  old  Sta 
Marta  newspaper.  His  horse  — a  strong- 
hearted  but  persevering  black  brute,  with  a 
hammer  head — you  would  have  seen  in  the 
street  dozing  motionless  under  an  immense 
saddle,  with  its  nose  almost  touching  the 
curbstone  of  the  side-walk !  " 

How  perfectly  recollected  is  that  passage  ! 
Can  we  not  hear  the  exclamation  of  some 
reader  'Yes — those  orange-trees!  It 
was  just  like  that  when  I  was  there  !  "  How 
convinced  we  are  of  Conrad's  unimpeachable 
veracity !  How  like  him  are  those  re- 
membered details,  "  the  nailed  doors,"  "  the 
fine  stone  hands,"  "  at  arm's-length"  ! — and 
can  we  not  sniff  something  of  the  author's 
impatience  to  let  himself  go  and  tell  us  more 
about  that  "  hammer-headed  horse "  of 
whose  adventures  with  Don  Pepe  he  must 
remember  enough  to  fill  a  volume ! 

He  is  able,  therefore,  upon  this  foundation 
95 


JOSEPH  CONRAD 


of  a  minute  and  scrupulous  realism  to  build 
as  fantastic  a  building  as  he  pleases  without 
fear  of  denying  Truth.  He  does  not,  in 
Nostromo  at  any  rate,  choose  to  be  fantastic, 
but  he  is  romantic,  and  our  final  impression 
of  the  silver  mine  and  the  town  under  its 
white  shining  shadow  is  of  something  both 
as  real  and  as  beautiful  as  any  vision  of 
Keats  or  Shelley.  But  with  the  colour  we 
remember  also  the  grim  tragedy  of  the  life 
that  has  been  shown  to  us.  Near  to  the 
cathedral  and  the  little  tinkering  streets  of 
the  guitars  were  the  last  awful  struggles  of 
the  unhappy  Hirsch.  We  remember  Nos- 
tromo riding,  with  his  silver  buttons,  catch- 
ing the  red  flower  flung  to  him  out  of  the 
crowd,  but  we  remember  also  his  death  and 
the  agony  of  his  defeated  pride.  Sotillo, 
the  vainest  and  most  sordid  of  bandits,  is 
no  figure  for  a  fairy  story. 

Here,  then,  is  the  secret  of  Conrad's  at- 
mosphere. He  is  the  poet,  working  through 
realism,  to  the  poetic  vision  of  life.  That 
intention  is  at  the  heart  of  his  work  from 
the  first  line  of  Almayer's  Folly  to  the  last 
96 


THE  POET 


line  of  Victory.  Nostromo  is  not  simply 
the  history  of  certain  lives  that  were  con- 
cerned in  a  South  American  revolution.  It 
is  that  history,  but  it  is  also  a  vision,  a  state- 
ment of  beauty  that  has  no  country,  nor 
period,  and  sets  no  barrier  of  immediate 
history  or  fable  for  its  interpretation.  .  .  . 

When,  however,  we  come  finally  to  the 
philosophy  that  lies  behind  this  creation 
of  character  and  atmosphere  we  perceive, 
beyond  question,  certain  limitations. 

in 

As  we  have  already  seen,  Conrad  is  of  the 
firm  and  resolute  conviction  that  life  is  too 
strong,  too  clever  and  too  remorseless  for  the 
sons  of  men. 

It  is  as  though,  from  some  high  window, 
looking  down,  he  were  able  to  watch  some 
shore,  from  whose  security  men  were  for 
ever  launching  little  cockle-shell  boats  upon 
a  limitless  and  angry  sea.  He  observes 
them,  as  they  advance  with  confidence,  with 
determination,  each  with  his  own  sure 
Q  97 


JOSEPH  CONRAD 


ambition  of  nailing  victory  to  his  mast ;  he 
alone  can  see  that  the  horizon  is  limitless ; 
he  can  see  farther  than  they — from  his 
height  he  can  follow  their  fortunes,  their 
brave  struggles,  their  fortitude  to  the  very 
last.  He  admires  that  courage,  the  sim- 
plicity of  that  faith,  but  his  irony  springs 
from  his  knowledge  of  the  inevitable  end. 

There  are,  we  may  thankfully  maintain, 
other  possible  views  of  life,  and  it  is,  surely, 
Conrad's  harshest  limitation  that  he  should 
never  be  free  from  this  certain  obsession  of 
the  vanity  of  human  struggle.  So  bound  is 
he  by  this  that  he  is  driven  to  choose  char- 
acters who  will  prove  his  faith.  We  can 
remember  many  fine  and  courageous  char- 
acters of  his  creation,  we  can  remember  no 
single  one  who  is  not  foredoomed  to  defeat. 
Jim  wins,  indeed,  his  victory,  but  at  the 
close :  "  And  that's  the  end.  He  passes 
away  under  a  cloud,  inscrutable  at  heart, 
forgotten,  unforgiven,  and  excessively  ro- 
mantic. ...  He  goes  away  from  a  living 
woman  to  celebrate  his  pitiless  wedding 
with  a  shadowy  ideal  of  conduct." 
98 


Conrad's  ironical  smile  that  has  watched 
with  tenderness  the  history  of  Jim's  endeav- 
ours, proclaims,  at  the  last,  that  that  pursuit 
has  been  vain — as  vain  as  Stein's  butterflies. 

And,  for  the  rest,  as  Mr  Curie  in  his  study 
of  Conrad  has  admirably  observed,  every 
character  is  faced  with  the  enemy  for  whom 
he  is,  by  character,  least  fitted.  Nostromo, 
whose  heart's  desire  it  is  that  his  merits 
should  be  acclaimed  before  men,  is  devoured 
by  the  one  dragon  to  whom  human  achieve- 
ments are  nothing — lust  of  treasure. 

M 'Whirr,  the  most  unimaginative  of  men, 
is  opposed  by  the  most  tremendous  of 
God's  splendid  terrors  and,  although  he 
saves  his  ship  from  the  storm,  so  blind  is  he 
to  the  meaning  of  the  things  that  he  has 
witnessed  that  he  might  as  well  have  never 
been  born.  Captain  Brierley,  watching  the 
degradation  of  a  fellow-creature  from  a 
security  that  nothing,  it  seems,  can  threaten, 
is  himself  caught  by  that  very  degrada- 
tion. .  .  .  The  Beast  in  the  Jungle  is  wait- 
ing ever  ready  to  leap — the  victim  is  always 
in  his  power. 

99 


JOSEPH  CONKAD 


It  comes  from  this  philosophy  of  life  that 
the  qualities  in  the  human  soul  that  Conrad 
most  definitely  admires  are  blind  courage 
and  obedience  to  duty.  His  men  of  brain 
— Marlowe,  Decoud,  Stein — are  melancholy 
and  ironic :  "If  you  see  far  enough  you 
must  see  how  hopeless  the  struggle  is." 
The  only  way  to  be  honestly  happy  is  to 
have  no  imagination  and,  because  Conrad 
is  tender  at  heart  and  would  have  his  char- 
acters happy,  if  possible,  he  chooses  men 
without  imagination.  Those  are  the  men 
of  the  sea  whom  he  has  known  and  loved. 
The  men  of  the  land  see  farther  than  the  men 
of  the  sea  and  must,  therefore,  be  either  fools 
or  knaves.  Towards  Captain  Anthony,  to- 
wards Captain  Lingard  he  extends  his  love 
and  pity.  For  Verloc,  for  Ossipon,  for  old 
De  Barral  he  has  a  disgust  that  is  beyond 
words.  For  the  Fynes  and  their  brethren 
he  has  contempt.  For  two  women  of  the 
land,  Winnie  Verloc  and  Mrs  Gould,  he 
reserves  his  love,  and  for  them  alone,  but 
they  have,  in  their  hearts,  the  simplicity, 
the  honesty  of  his  own  sea  captains. 
100 


THE  POET 


This  then  is  quite  simply  his  philosophy. 
It  has  no  variation  or  relief.  He  will  not 
permit  his  characters  to  escape,  he  will  not 
himself  try  to  draw  the  soul  of  a  man  who  is 
stronger  than  Fate.  His  ironic  melancholy 
does  not,  for  an  instant,  hamper  his  interest 
— that  is  as  keen  and  acute  as  is  the  absorp- 
tion of  any  collector  of  specimens — but  at 
the  end  of  it  all,  as  with  his  own  Stein: 
c'  He  says  of  him  that  he  is  '  preparing  to 
leave  all  this:  preparing  to  leave  .  .  .' 
while  he  waves  his  hand  sadly  at  his 
butterflies." 

Utterly  opposed  is  it  from  the  philosophy 
of  the  one  English  writer  whom,  in  all  other 
ways,  Conrad  most  obviously  resembles— 
Robert  Browning.  As  philosophers  they 
have  no  possible  ground  of  communication, 
save  in  tLe  honesty  that  is  common  to  both 
of  them.  As  artists,  both  in  their  subjects 
and  their  treatment  of  their  subjects,  they 
are,  in  many  ways,  of  an  amazing  resem- 
blance, although  the  thorough  investigation 
of  that  resemblance  would  need  far  more 
space  than  I  can  give  it  here.  Browning's 
101 


JOSEPH  CONRAD 


interest  in  life  was  derived,  on  the  novelist's 
side  of  him,  from  his  absorption  in  the 
affairs,  spiritual  and  physical,  of  men  and 
women ;  on  the  poet's  side,  in  the  question 
again  spiritual  and  physical,  that  arose  from 
those  affairs.  Conrad  has  not  Browning's 
clear-eyed  realisation  of  the  necessity  of 
discovering  the  individual  philosophy  that 
belongs  to  every  individual  case — he  is  too 
immediately  enveloped  in  his  one  over- 
whelming melancholy  analysis.  But  he  has 
exactly  that  eager,  passionate  pursuit  of 
romance,  a  romance  to  be  seized  only 
through  the  most  accurate  and  honest 
realism. 

Browning's  realism  was  born  of  his  excite- 
ment at  the  number  and  interest  of  his  dis- 
coveries; he  chose,  for  instance,  in  Sordello 
the  most  romantic  of  subjects,  and,  having 
made  his  choice,  found  that  there  was  such  a 
world  of  realistic  detail  in  the  case  that,  in 
his  excitement,  he  forgot  that  the  rest  of  the 
world  did  not  know  quite  as  much  as  he  did. 
Is  not  this  exactly  what  we  may  say  of 
Nostromo  ?  Mr  Chesterton  has  written  of 
102 


THE  POET 


Browning :  "He  substituted  the  street  with 
the  green  blind  for  the  faded  garden  of 
Watteau,  and  the  '  blue  spirt  of  a  lighted 
match'  for  the  monotony  of  the  evening 
star."  Conrad  has  substituted  for  the  lover 
serenading  his  mistress'  window  the  passion 
of  a  middle-aged,  faded  woman  for  her  idiot 
boy,  or  the  elopement  of  the  daughter 
of  a  fraudulent  speculator  with  an  elderly, 
taciturn  sea  captain. 

The  characters  upon  whom  Robert 
Browning  lavished  his  affection  are  pre- 
cisely Conrad's  characters.  Is  not  Waring 
Conrad's  man  ? 

And  for  the  rest,  is  not  Mr  Sludge  own 
brother  to  Verloc  and  old  De  Barrel? 
Bishop  Blougram  first  cousin  to  the  great 
Personage  in  The  Secret  Agent,  Captain 
Anthony  brother  to  Caponsacchi,  Mrs  Gould 
sister  to  Pompilia  ?  It  is  not  only  that 
Browning  and  Conrad  both  investigate  these 
characters  with  the  same  determination  to 
extract  the  last  word  of  truth  from  the 
matter,  not  grimly,  but  with  a  thri  ling  beat 
of  the  heart,  it  is  also  that  the  worlds  of  these 
103 


JOSEPH  CONRAD 


two  poets  are  the  same.  How  deeply  would 
Nostromo,  Decoud,  Gould,  Monyngham, 
the  Verlocs,  Flora  de  Barrel,  M'Whirr,  Jim 
have  interested  Browning !  Surely  Conrad 
has  witnessed  the  revelation  of  Caliban,  of 
Childe  Roland,  of  James  Lee's  wife,  of  the 
figures  in  the  Arezzo  tragedy,  even  of  that 
bishop  who  ordered  his  tomb  at  St  Praxed's 
Church,  with  a  strange  wonder  as  though  he 
himself  had  assisted  at  these  discoveries ! 

Finally,  The  Ring  and  the  Book,  with  its 
multiplied  witnesses,  its  statement  as  a 
"  case  "  of  life,  its  pursuit  of  beauty  through 
truth,  the  simplicity  of  the  characters  of 
Pompilia,  Caponsacchi  and  the  Pope,  the 
last  frantic  appeal  of  Guido,  the  detail,  en- 
crusted thick  in  the  walls  of  that  superb 
building — here  we  can  see  the  highest 
pinnacle  of  that  temple  that  has  Chance, 
Lord  Jim,  Nostromo  amongst  its  other 
turrets,  buttresses  and  towers. 

Conrad  is  his  own  master — he  has  imitated 

no  one,  he  has  created,  as  I  have  already 

said,  his  own  planet,  but  the  heights  to  which 

Browning  carried  Romantic-Realism  showed 

104 


THE  POET 


the  author  of  Almayer's  Folly  the  signs  of 
the  road  that  he  was  to  follow. 

If,  as  has  often  been  said,  Browning  was 
as  truly  novelist  as  poet,  may  we  not  now 
say  with  equal  justice  that  Conrad  is  as 
truly  poet  as  novelist  ? 


105 


IV 
KOMANCE  AND  REALISM 


THE  terms,  Romance  and  Realism, 
have  been  used  of  late  years  very 
largely  as  a  means  of  escape  from 
this  business  of  the  creation  of  character. 
The  purely  romantic  novel  may  now  be  said 
to  be,  in  England  at  any  rate,  absolutely  dead. 
Mr  Frank  Swinnerton,  in  his  study  of  Robert 
Louis  Stevenson,  said :  "  Stevenson,  reviving 
the  never-very-prosperous  romance  of  Eng- 
land, created  a  school  which  has  brought 
romance  to  be  the  sweepings  of  an  old 
costume-chest ;  ...  if  romance  is  to  be  con- 
ventional in  a  double  sense,  if  it  spring  not 
from  a  personal  vision  of  life,  but  is  only 
a  tedious  virtuosity,  a  pretence,  a  conscious 
toy,  romance  as  an  art  is  dead.  The  art 
was  jaded  when  Reade  finished  his  vocifer- 
106 


ROMANCE  AND  REALISM 

ous  carpet-beating;    but  it  was  not  dead. 
And  if  it  is  dead,  Stevenson  killed  it !  " 

We  may  differ  very  considerably  from 
Mr  Swinnerton  with  regard  to  his  estimate 
of  Stevenson's  present  and  future  literary 
value  without  denying  that  the  date  of 
the  publication  of  St  Ives  was  also  the 
date  of  the  death  of  the  purely  romantic 
novel. 

But,  surely,  here,  as  Mr  Swinnerton  him- 
self infers,  the  term  "  Romantic  "  is  used  in 
the  limited  and  truncated  idea  that  has 
formed,  lately  the  popular  idea  of  Romance. 
In  exactly  the  same  way  the  term  "  Real- 
ism" has,  recently,  been  most  foolishly 
and  uncritically  handicapped.  Romance, 
in  its  modern  use,  covers  everything  that  is 
removed  from  reality :  "I  like  romances," 
we  hear  the  modern  reader  say,  "  because 
they  take  me  away  from  real  life,  which  I 
desire  to  forget."  In  the  same  way  Real- 
ism is  defined  by  its  enemies  as  a  photo- 
graphic enumeration  of  unimportant  facts 
by  an  observant  pessimist.  "  I  like  real- 
ism," admirers  of  a  certain  order  of  novel 
107 


JOSEPH  CONRAD 


exclaim,  "  because  it  is  so  like  life.  It  tells 
me  just  what  I  myself  see  every  day — I 
know  where  I  am." 

Nevertheless,  impatient  though  we  may 
be  of  these  utterly  false  ideas  of  Romance 
and  Realism,  a  definition  of  those  terms 
that  will  satisfy  everyone  is  almost  im- 
possible. I  cannot  hope  to  achieve  so 
exclusive  an  ambition — I  can  only  say  that 
to  myself  Realism  is  the  study  of  life  with 
all  the  rational  faculties  of  observation, 
reason  and  reminiscence — Romance  is  the 
study  of  life  with  the  faculties  of  imagina- 
tion. I  do  not  mean  that  Realism  may  not 
be  emotional,  poetic,  even  lyrical,  but  it  is 
based  always  upon  truth  perceived  and 
recorded — it  is  the  essence  of  observation. 
In  the  same  way  Romance  may  be,  indeed 
must  be,  accurate  and  denned  in  its  own 
world,  but  its  spirit  is  the  spirit  of  imagina- 
tion, working  often  upon  observation  and 
sometimes  simply  upon  inspiration.  It  is, 
at  any  rate,  understood  here  that  the  word 
Romance  does  not,  for  a  moment,  imply  a 
necessary  divorce  from  reality,  nor  does 
108 


ROMANCE  AND  REALISM 

Realism  imply  a  detailed  and  dusty  pre- 
ference for  morbid  and  unagreeable  sub- 
jects. It  is  possible  for  Romance  to  be  as 
honestly  and  clearly  perceptive  as  Realism, 
but  it  is  not  so  easy  for  it  to  be  so  because 
imagination  is  more  difficult  of  discipline 
than  observation.  It  is  possible  for  Realism 
to  be  as  eloquent  and  potential  as  Romance, 
although  it  cannot  so  easily  achieve  eloquence 
because  of  its  fear  of  deserting  truth.  More- 
over, with  regard  to  the  influence  of  foreign 
literature  upon  the  English  novel,  it  may  be 
suggested  that  the  influence  of  the  French 
novel,  which  was  at  its  strongest  between 
the  years  of  1885  and  1895,  was  towards 
Realism,  and  that  the  influence  of  the 
Russian  novel,  which  has  certainly  been  very 
strongly  marked  in  England  during  th  last 
years,  is  all  towards  Romantic-Realism.  If 
we  wished  to  know  exactly  what  is  meant 
by  Romantic-Realism,  such  a  novel  as  The 
Brothers  Karamazov,  such  a  play  as  The 
Cherry  Orchard  are  there  before  us,  as  the 
best  possible  examples.  We  might  say,  in 
a  word,  that  Karamazov  has,  in  the  England 
109 


JOSEPH  CONRAD 


of  1915,  taken  the  place  that  was  occupied, 
in  1890,  by  Madame  Bovary.  .  .  . 

II 

It  is  Joseph  Conrad  whose  influence  is 
chiefly  responsible  for  this  development  in 
the  English  novel.  Just  as,  in  the  early 
nineties,  Mr  Henry  James  and  Mr  Rudyard 
Kipling,  the  one  potential,  the  other  kinetic, 
influenced,  beyond  all  contemporary  novel- 
ists, the  minds  of  their  younger  generation, 
so  to-day,  twenty-five  years  later,  do  Mr 
Joseph  Conrad  and  Mr  H.  G.  Wells,  the  one 
potential,  the  other  kinetic,  hold  that  same 
position. 

Joseph  Conrad,  from  the  very  first,  in- 
fluenced though  he  was  by  the  French  novel, 
showed  that  Realism  alone  was  not  enough 
for  him.  That  is  to  say  that,  in  presenting 
the  case  of  Almayer,  it  was  not  enough  for 
him  merely  to  state  as  truthfully  as  possible 
the  facts.  Those  facts,  sordid  as  they  are, 
make  the  story  of  Almayer' s  degradation 
sufficiently  realistic,  when  it  is  merely 
110 


ROMANCE  AND  EEALISM 

recorded  and  perceived  by  any  observer. 
But  upon  these  recorded  facts  Conrad's 
imagination,  without  for  a  moment  desert- 
ing the  truth,  worked,  beautifying,  ennob- 
ling it,  giving  it  pity  and  terror,  above  all 
putting  it  into  relation  with  the  whole 
universe,  the  whole  history  of  the  cycle  of 
life  and  death. 

As  I  have  said,  the  Romantic  novel,  in 
its  simplest  form,  was  used,  very  often, 
by  writers  who  wished  to  escape  from  the 
business  of  the  creation  of  character.  It 
had  not  been  used  for  that  purpose  by  Sir 
Walter  Scott,  who  was,  indeed,  the  first 
English  Romantic-Realist,  but  it  was  so 
used  by  his  successors,  who  found  a  little 
optimism,  a  little  adventure,  a  little  colour 
and  a  little  tradition  go  a  long  way  towards 
covering  the  required  ground. 

Conrad  had,  from  the  first,  a  poet's — that 
is  to  say,  a  romantic — mind,  and  his  deter- 
mination to  use  that  romance  realistically 
was  simply  his  determination  to  justify  the 
full  play  of  his  romantic  mind  in  the  eyes  of 
all  honest  men. 

Ill 


JOSEPH  CONRAD 


In  that  intention  he  has  absolutely  suc- 
ceeded ;  he  has  not  abated  one  jot  of  his 
romance — Nostromo,  Lord  Jim,  Heart  of 
Darkness  are  amongst  the  most  romantic 
things  in  all  our  literature — but  the  last 
charge  that  any  critic  can  make  against  him 
is  falsification,  whether  of  facts,  of  inference 
or  of  consequences. 

The  whole  history  of  his  development  has 
for  its  key-stone  this  determination  to  save 
his  romance  by  his  reality,  to  extend  his 
reality  by  his  romance.  He  found  in  English 
fiction  little  that  could  assist  him  in  this 
development ;  the  Russian  novelists  were  to 
supply  him  with  his  clue.  This  whole  question 
of  Russian  influence  is  difficult  to  define, 
but  that  Conrad  has  been  influenced  by 
Turgeniev  a  little  and  by  Dostoievsky  very 
considerably,  cannot  be  denied.  Crime  and 
Punishment,  The  Idiot,  The  Possessed,  The 
Brothers  Karamazov  are  romantic  realism 
at  the  most  astonishing  heights  that  this 
development  of  the  novel  is  ever  likely  to 
attain.  We  will  never  see  again  heroes  of 
the  Prince  Myshkin,  Dmitri  Karamazov, 
112 


KOMANCE  AND  REALISM 

Nicolas  Stavrogin  build,  men  so  real  to  us 
that  no  change  of  time  or  place,  age  or 
sickness  can  take  them  from  us,  men  so 
beautifully  lit  with  the  romantic  passion 
of  Dostoievsky's  love  of  humanity  that  they 
seem  to  warm  the  whole  world,  as  we  know 
it,  with  the  fire  of  their  charity.  That 
power  of  creating  figures  typical  as  well  as 
individual  has  been  denied  to  Conrad. 
Captain  Anthony,  Nostromo,  Jim  do  not 
belong  to  the  whole  world,  nor  do  they 
escape  the  limitations  and  confinements 
that  their  presentation  as  "  cases  "  involves 
on  them.  Moreover,  Conrad  does  not  love 
humanity.  He  feels  pity,  tenderness,  ad- 
miration, but  love,  except  for  certain  of 
his  sea  heroes,  never,  and  even  with  his  sea 
heroes  it  is  love  built  on  his  scorn  of  the  land. 
Dostoievsky  scorned  no  one  and  nothing; 
as  relentless  in  his  pursuit  of  the  truth  as 
Stendhal  or  Flaubert,  he  found  humanity, 
as  he  investigated  it,  beautiful  because  of  its 
humanity — Conrad  finds  humanity  pitiable 
because  of  its  humanity. 
Nevertheless  he  has  been  influenced  by 
H  113 


JOSEPH  CONKAD 


the  Russian  writer  continuously  and  some- 
times obviously.  In  at  least  one  novel, 
Under  Western  Eyes,  the  influence  has  led 
to  imitation.  For  that  reason,  perhaps, 
that  novel  is  the  least  vital  of  all  his  books, 
and  we  feel  as  though  Dostoievsky  had  given 
him  Razumov  to  see  what  he  could  make  of 
him,  and  had  remained  too  overwhelmingly 
curious  an  onlooker  to  allow  independent 
creation.  What,  however,  Conrad  has  in 
common  with  the  creator  of  Raskolnikov 
is  his  thrilling  pursuit  of  the  lives,  the  hearts, 
the  minutest  details  of  his  characters. 
Conrad  alone  of  all  English  novelists  shares 
this  zest  with  the  great  Russian.  Dostoiev- 
sky found  his  romance  in  his  love  of  his 
fellow-beings,  Conrad  finds  his  in  his  love 
of  beauty,  his  poet's  cry  for  colour,  but 
their  realism  they  find  together  in  the  hearts 
of  men — and  they  find  it  not  as  Flaubert, 
that  they  make  of  it  a  perfect  work  of  art, 
not  as  Turgeniev,  that  they  may  extract 
from  it  a  Lower  of  poignant  beauty,  not  as 
Tolstoi,  tL»fc  they  may,  from  it,  found  a 
gospel — simply  they  pursue  their  quest 
114 


ROMANCE  AND  REALISM 

because  the  breathless  interest  of  the  pursuit 
is  stronger  than  they.  They  have,  both  of 
them,  created  characters  simply  because 
characters  demanded  to  be  created.  We 
feel  that  Emma  Bovary  was  dragged,  pain- 
fully, arduously,  against  all  the  strength  of 
her  determination,  out  of  the  shades  where 
she  was  lurking.  Myshkin,  the  Karama- 
zovs,  and,  in  their  own  degree,  Nostromo, 
Almayer,  M'Whirr,  demanded  that  they 
should  be  flung  upon  the  page. 

Instead  of  seizing  upon  Romance  as  a 
means  of  avoiding  character,  he  has  triumph- 
antly forced  it  to  aid  him  in  the  creation  of 
the  lives  that,  through  him,  demand  exis- 
tence. This  may  be  said  to  be  the  great 
thing  that  Conrad  has  done  for  the  English 
novel — he  has  brought  the  zest  of  creation 
back  into  it ;  the  French  novelists  used  life 
to  perfect  their  art — the  Russian  novelists 
used  art  to  liberate  their  passion  for  life. 
That  at  this  moment  in  Russia  the  novel 
has  lost  that  zest,  that  the  work  of  Koup- 
rin,  Artzybashev,  Sologub,  Merejkovsky, 
Andreiev,  shows  exhaustion  and  sterility 
115 


JOSEPH  CONKAD 


means  nothing;  the  stream  will  soon  run 
full  again.  Meanwhile  we,  in  England, 
know  once  more  what  it  is  to  feel,  in  the 
novel,  the  power  behind  the  novelist,  to  be 
ourselves  in  the  grip  of  a  force  that  is  not 
afraid  of  romance  nor  ashamed  of  realism, 
that  cares  for  life  as  life  and  not  as  a  means 
of  proving  the  necessity  for  form,  the  danger 
of  too  many  adjectives,  the  virtues  of  the 
divorce  laws  or  the  paradise  of  free  love. 

in 

Finally,  what  will  be  the  effect  of  the  work 
of  Joseph  Conrad  upon  the  English  novel  of 
the  future?  Does  this  Komantic-Eealism 
that  he  has  provided  for  us  show  any  signs 
of  influencing  that  future  ?  I  think  that  it 
does.  In  the  work  of  all  of  the  more  inter- 
esting younger  English  novelists — in  the 
work  of  Mr  E.  M.  Forster,  Mr  D.  H. 
Lawrence,  Mr  J.  D.  Beresford,  Mr  W.  L. 
George,  Mr  Frank  Swinnerton,  Mr  Gilbert 
Cannan,  Miss  Viola  Meynell,  Mr  Brett 
Young — this  influence  is  to  be  detected. 
116 


ROMANCE  AND  REALISM 

Even  with  such  avowed  realists  as  Mr  Beres- 
ford,  Mr  George  and  Mr  Swinnerton  the 
realism  is  of  a  nature  very  different  from  the 
realism  of  even  ten  years  ago,  as  can  be  seen 
at  once  by  comparing  so  recent  a  novel  as 
Mr  Swinnerton' s  On  the  Staircase  with  Mr 
Arnold  Bennett's  Sacred  and  Profane  Love, 
or  Mr  Galsworthy's  Man  of  Property — and 
Mr  E.  M.  Forster  is  a  romantic-realist  of  most 
curious  originality,  whose  Longest  Journey 
and  Howard's  End  may  possibly  provide  the 
historian  of  English  literature  with  dates  as 
important  as  the  publication  of  Almayer's 
Fotty  in  1895.  The  answer  to  this  question 
does  not  properly  belong  to  this  essay. 

It  is,  at  any  rate,  certain  that  neither  the 
old  romance  nor  the  old  realism  can  return. 
We  have  been  shown  in  Nostromo  something 
that  has  the  colour  of  Treasure  Island  and 
the  reality  of  New  Grub  Street.  If,  on  the 
one  hand,  the  pessimists  lament  that  the 
English  novel  is  dead,  that  everything  that 
can  be  done  has  been  done,  there  is,  surely, 
on  the  other  hand,  some  justification  for  the 
optimists  who  believe  that  at  few  periods  in 
117 


JOSEPH  CONRAD 


English  literature  has  the  novel  shown  more 
signs  of  a  thrilling  and  original  future. 

For  signs  of  the  possible  development  of 
Conrad  himself  one  may  glance  for  a  moment 
at  his  last  novel,  Victory. 

The  conclusion  of  Chance  and  the  last 
volume  of  short  stories  had  shown  that  there 
was  some  danger  lest  romance  should  divorce 
him,  ultimately,  from  reality.  Victory, 
splendid  tale  though  it  is,  does  not  entirely 
reassure  us.  The  theme  of  the  book  is  the 
pursuit  of  almost  helpless  uprightness  and 
innocence  by  almost  helpless  evil  and 
malignancy ;  that  is  to  say  that  the  strength 
and  virtue  of  Heyst  and  Lena  are  as  elemental 
and  independent  of  human  will  and  effort 
as  the  villainy  and  slime  of  Mr  Jones  and 
Ricardo.  Conrad  has  here  then  returned  to 
his  old  early  demonstration  that  nature  is 
too  strong  for  man  and  I  feel  as  though,  in 
this  book,  he  had  intended  the  whole  affair 
to  be  blown,  finally,  sky-high  by  some  natural 
volcanic  eruption.  He  prepares  for  that 
eruption  and  when,  for  some  reason  or 
another,  that  elemental  catastrophe  is  pre- 
118 


ROMANCE  AND  REALISM 

vented  he  consoles  himself  by  strewing  the 
beach  of  his  island  with  the  battered  corpses 
of  his  characters.  It  is  in  such  a  wanton 
conclusion,  following  as  it  does  immediately 
upon  the  finest,  strongest  and  most  beautiful 
thing  in  the  whole  of  Conrad — the  last 
conversation  between  Heyst  and  Lena — 
that  we  see  this  above-mentioned  divorce 
from  reality.  We  see  it  again  in  the  more 
fantastic  characteristics  of  Mr  Jones  and 
Ricardo,  in  the  presence  of  the  Orang- 
Outang,  and  in  other  smaller  and  less 
important  effects.  At  the  same  time  his 
realism,  when  he  pleases,  as  in  the  arrival 
of  the  boat  of  the  thirst-maddened  trio  on 
the  island  beach,  is  as  magnificent  in  its 
austerity  and  truth  as  ever  it  was. 

Will  he  allow  his  imagination  to  carry  him 
wildly  into  fantasy  and  incredibility?  He 
has  not,  during  these  last  years,  exerted  the 
discipline  and  restraint  that  were  once  his 
law. 

Nevertheless,  at  the  last,  when  one  looks 
back  over  twenty  years,  from  the  Almayer's 
Folly  of  1895  to  the  Victory  of  1916,  one 
119 


JOSEPH  CONRAD 


realises  that  it  was,  for  the  English  novel, 
no  mean  nor  insignificant  fortune  that 
brought  the  author  of  those  books  to  our 
shores  to  give  a  fresh  impetus  to  the  pro- 
gress of  our  literature  and  to  enrich  our 
lives  with  a  new  world  of  character  and  high 
adventure. 


120 


A  SHOKT  BIBLIOGRAPHY  OF 
JOSEPH  CONRAD'S  PKINCI- 
PAL  WRITINGS 

[The  date  is  given  of  the  first  edition  of  each  book.  New 
edition  signifies  a  change  of  format  or  transference  to  a 
different  publisher.  ] 

Almayer's   Folly :   A  Story   of    an    Eastern  River 

( Unwiri).     1895.     New  editions  :  (Nash).    1904 ; 

(Untvin).     1909,  1914,  1915. 
An  Outcast  of  the  Islands  (Unwin).     1896.     New 

edition,  1914. 
The  Nigger  of  the  "  Narcissus  " :  A  Tale  of  the  Sea 

(Heinemann).     1897.     New  edition,  1910. 
Tales  of  Unrest  (Unwin).     1898.     New  edition,  1909. 
Lord  Jim :  A  Tale  (Blackwood).     1900.     New  edition, 

1914. 
The  Inheritors :  An  Extravagant  Story.     By  Joseph 

Conrad  and  Ford  M.  Hueffer  (Heinemann}.   1901. 
Youth  :  a  Narrative,  and  Two  Other  Stories  (Black- 
wood).     1902. 
Typhoon   and    Other   Stories    (Heinemann).     1903. 

New  edition,  1912. 
Romance:  A  Novel.     By  Joseph  Conrad  and  Ford 

Madox   Hueffer    (Smith,   Elder).      1903.      New 

edition  (Nelson).     1909. 
121 


JOSEPH  CONRAD 


Nostromo :  A  Tale  of  the  Seaboard  (Harper).    1904. 
The  Mirror  of  the  Sea :  Memories  and  Impressions 

(Methueri).     1906.     New  editions,  1913,  1915. 
The  Secret  Agent :  A  Simple  Tale  (Methueri).     1907. 

New  edition,  1914. 

A  Set  of  Six  :  Tales  (Methuen).     1908. 
Under  Western  Eyes  (Methueri).    1911.    New  edition, 

1915. 

Some  Reminiscences  (Nash}.     1912. 
'Twixt  Land  and   Sea:    Tales  (Dent).     1912.     New 

edition,  1914. 

Chance :  A  Tale  in  Two  Parts  (Methueri).     1914. 
Within  the  Tides  :  Tales  (Dent).     1915. 
Victory :  An  Island  Tale  (Methuen).     1915. 


122 


AMERICAN  BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Almayer's  Folly :  A  Story  of  an  Eastern  River 
(Macmillan).  1895.  New  editions,  1912; 
(Doubleday).  1914. 

An  Outcast  of  the  Islands  (Appleton).  1896.  New 
edition  (Doubleday).  1914. 

Children  of  the  Sea :  A  Tale  of  the  Forecastle  (Dodd, 
Mead).  1897.  New  edition,  1912.  New  edition 
under  English  title  :  "  The  Nigger  of  the  '  Nar- 
cissus '"  (Doubleday).  1914. 

Tales  of  Unrest  (Scribner).     1898. 

Lord  Jim  (Doubleday)     1900.     New  edition,  1914. 

The  Inheritors.  By  Joseph  Conrad  and  Ford  M. 
Hueffer  (McClure  Co.}.  1901. 

Typhoon  (Putman).  1902.  New  edition  (Doubleday). 
1914. 

Youth,  and  two  Other  Stories  {McClure  Co.  After- 
wards transferred  to  Doubleday).  1903. 

Falk:  Amy  Foster:  To-morrow  [Three  Stories] 
(McClure  Co.).  1903.  New  edition  (Doubleday). 
1914. 

Romance.  By  Joseph  Conrad  and  Ford  Madox 
Hueffer  (McClure  Co.  Afterwards  transferred 
to  Doubleday).  1904. 

Nostromo  :  A  Tale  of  the  Seaboard  (Harper).  1904. 
123 


JOSEPH  CONRAD 


The  Mirror  of  the  Sea :  Memories  and  Impressions 

(Harper).     1906. 

The  Secret  Agent :  A  Simple  Tale  (Harper).     1907. 
A  Point  of  Honour:  A  Military  Tale  (McClure  Co. 

Afterwards  transferred  to  Doubleday).     1908. 
Under  Western  Eyes :  A  Novel  (Harper).     1911. 
A  Personal  Kecord  (Harper).     1912. 
'Twixt  Land  and  Sea :  Tales  (Doran).     1912.     New 

edition  (Doubleday).     1914. 

Chance :  A  Tale  in  Two  Parts  (Doubleday).     1914. 
A  Set  of  Six  [Tales:  one,  "The  Duel,"  previously 

issued  as  "A  Point  of  Honour"]  (Doubleday). 

1915. 

Victory  :  An  Island  Tale  (Doubleday).     1915. 
Within  the  Tides:  Tales  (Doubleday).    1918. 


124 


INDEX 


Almayer'i  Folly,  9,  12,  13,  14,  22,  38,  75,  119 

Bennett,  Arnold,  59,  83 
Beresford,  J.  D.,  116 
Brothers  Karamazov,  The,  109 
Browning,  84,  101,  102,  103,  104 

Chance,  14,  10,  21,  43,  53,  56,  119 
Cherry  Orchard,  The,  60,  109 
Chesterton,  G.  K,,  84 
Conrad,  J.,  birth,  8  ;  naturalised,  8 
Curie,  R.,  99 

Dickens,  85 

Dostoievsky,  20,  84,  113,  114 

Eliot,  George,  85 
End  of  the  Tether,  The,  56 
Evan  Harrington,  38 
Eve  ofSt  Agnes,  The,  81 

Flaubert,  77,  114 

Form,  40 

Forster,  E.  M.,  117 

Freya  of  the  Seven  Islands,  35 

Galsworthy,  J. ,  59 
George,  W.  L.,  116 

Hardy,  38,  59,  93 

Heart  of  Darkness,  17,  56,  75,  79,  81 

Hueffer,  F.  M.,  14 

125 


JOSEPH  CONRAD 


Irony,  55 

James,  Henry,  38,  41,  42,  59,  110 

Keats,  81 

Kipling,  R.,  38,  110 

Lord  Jim,  13,  16,  43,  56,  75,  86 

Lyrical  impulse,  82 

Madame  Bovary,  38,  77,  110 
Meredith,  38,  84 
Method  in  fiction,  41,  48,  etc. 
Mid-Victorian  English  novel,  58 
Mirror  of  the  Sea,  The,  16,  21,  27,  30,  32 

Nature,  78 

Nigger  of  the  Narcissus,  The,  13,  15,  27,  56,  63,  75,  86 

Nostromo,  14,  18,  43,  49,  56,  79,  90,  96,  97,  102 

Outcast  of  the  Islands,  An,  14,  19,  73,  79,  82,  86 

Philosophy,  57 
Poland,  9,  24 

Realism,  108,  110 

Return,  The,  75 

Richard  Feverel,  38 

Romance,  14,  70 

Romance,  108.     Russian  influence,  109,  112,  eto. 

Sea,  8,  28 

Secret  Agent,  The,  14,  19,  57,  72,  82,  103 

Secret  Sharer,  The,  20 

Set  of  Six,  A,  20,  82 

Shaw,  Bernard,  39 

126 


INDEX 

Ships,  33 

Smile  of  Fortune,  A ,  20 

Some  Reminiscences,  21,  22, 26 

Sorddlo,  102 

Spectator,  The,  12 

Stevenson,  Robert  Louis,  38,  98 

Style,  82 

Swinnerton,  Frank,  106,  107,  116 

Tales  of  Unrest,  15,  76 

Tchekov,  60 

Themes,  54 

Tolstoi,  114 

T.  P.'s  Weekly,  18 

Tremolino,  35 

Trollope,  Anthony,  93 

Turg&iiev,  20,  84,  114 

'Twixt  Land  and  Sea,  20,  56 

Typhoon,  14,  17,  30,  56,  61,  75,  79,  80,  82 

Under  Western  Eyes,  19,  57,  72,  82 
Une  Vie,  38 

Victory,  14,  118 

Wells,  H.  G.,39,  59,  110 
Wharton,  Mrs,  69,  83 
Whitman,  81 

Yellow  Book,  The,  38 

Youth,  14,  17,  30,  75,  79,  80,  82 


127 


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